Extracting Resources From A CD-I Rom

CD-i Emulator is the first fully evolving windows compatible emulator project of the Philips CD-i system. Discuss the emulator, compatibility issues, seek help and support to get the program operating and post what you'd like to see in future revisions of the program. CD-i players ROM (BIOS) requests, begging and links will not be tolerated. Otherwise feel free to post your thoughts on this amazing new piece of software.
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Kao
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Extracting Resources From A CD-I Rom

Post by Kao » Sun Sep 11, 2005 12:42 am

I am very excited and thankful for a true CD-I emulator to finally be in existance, so please don't think my following question is the product of a lack of gratitude.

One thing I have really wanted to do for a long time now is dump specific resources from a CD-I ROM to my computer (i.e. sprites or background art). Will this be at all possible on the CD-I Emulator? Again, I'm just asking.
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cdifan
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Post by cdifan » Sun Sep 11, 2005 1:04 am

It depends on what you mean by a CD-i ROM...

In generally, the CD-i system ROMs are fixed inside the player and contain very little resources; there's an 8x8 font bitmap, some background images for the player shell and a few language modules (the details vary accross player models). These are all in the form of OS-9 memory modules; if you have the ROM files it's not really that hard to extract them. The ROM files can be uploaded with CD-i Link which is freely available already.

But you probably mean actual CD-i discs. Here it depends on the disc; there are a few standards for storing resources but many discs use custom data formats and/or may have the data embedded in the program code. You can use IsoBuster to extract files from the CD-i disc; for standard resources this works just fine.

In either case, you end up with resources in CD-i data formats; there is some software available that understands these formats but it requires some digging. And for custom data formats your luck just ran out...

Now, enter CD-i Emulator. For everything picture-wise it's a simple matter to make a screenshot of everything displayed, wether the data is stored in standard or custom formats. At some point there will also be a way to save the audio output; at present there is none built-in to the emulator. But you could grab the audio using any tool for capturing sound output, from looping back the speaker output to the microphone input with a cable (note: this can potentially damage your audio card!) to sophisticated "audio spy" programs.

About sprites... The CD-i system has no built-in sprite capability; every CD-i disc out there has its own software implementation of the concept. So apart from just making successive screenshots (you can single-step the emulator), there's not much you can do here...

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Post by Kao » Sun Sep 11, 2005 1:14 am

Excellent, you answered all my questions. Thank you :)
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CD-i artwork and sound

Post by davcrag » Thu Sep 22, 2005 5:23 pm

If you really want to grab an image or sound from a cd-i player, why not do what I do? I have one of my cd-i players plugged into my video capture board on my computer. I do this with s-video and rca patch cables. You can easily record or take a snapshot of anything you want.
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Post by cdifan » Thu Sep 22, 2005 6:12 pm

But it will be an analog grab and not exactly identical to the original.

You really have no idea how bad even s-video is until you've seen the digital originals, which so far has only been possible for CD-i developers.

For audio of course, the difference is usually neglegible.

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Post by davcrag » Thu Sep 22, 2005 6:16 pm

cdifan wrote:But it will be an analog grab and not exactly identical to the original.

You really have no idea how bad even s-video is until you've seen the digital originals, which so far has only been possible for CD-i developers.

For audio of course, the difference is usually neglegible.

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You are right on that one!
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