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I've been looking at getting a CDI for awhile, especially since I picked up a bunch of PAL discs at a local flea market. I'm in the US so I'm probably going to be buying NTSC games going forward to avoid shipping costs from Europe, but it would be nice to only need one CDI to buy new games for and play the discs I already have. The only unit I've seen mention of that plays both is the LG700. Do other units play both? Or any that are known to have problems with either? Along those lines, is there any benefit to playing games with one model over another (aside from some units having built in video)?

Thank you in advance for any help.

Ozaki wrote:I've been looking at getting a CDI for awhile, especially since I picked up a bunch of PAL discs at a local flea market..

What discs are these? Although there are some single-standard discs around (mainly professional titles, I think), most CD-i discs are dual-standard: they play on either PAL or NTSC units.

Ozaki wrote:I'm in the US so I'm probably going to be buying NTSC games going forward to avoid shipping costs from Europe, but it would be nice to only need one CDI to buy new games for and play the discs I already have.

See above. The only difference between "US" and "European" versions of most discs is the packaging, the bits on them are often identical.

Ozaki wrote:The only unit I've seen mention of that plays both is the LG700. Do other units play both?

Some players (CD-i 60x, 3xx) can be switched between PAL and NTSC, but that primarily affects the standard of the video output signal. You would need a dual-standard TV or monitor to handle this (lots of modern TVs do, at least here in Europe).

Ozaki wrote:Or any that are known to have problems with either? Along those lines, is there any benefit to playing games with one model over another (aside from some units having built in video)?

If you can, stay away from the so-called Roboco and Mono-II models, these are known to have problems with some discs. You can use the Comparison table of all Philips and Philips-build consumer CD-i players to check specific player models; off the top of my head the "bad" models are the CD-i 200/20, 210/20, 220/40 and 450.

All of the PAL discs I have are games, Zelda's Adventure, Burn Cycle, Dragon's Lair and a few others. I'm mainly going to use it for games, so as long as games play on both that is fantastic. My TV has never had any issues displaying PAL DVDs, so I'm not worried about that either.

At this point I'm looking at either the LG GDI 700 or a CDI 490, unless there's a cooler CDI model that isn't that hard to find. Can the serial port on the 700 be used for anything useful? Or is there a different model you'd recommend, knowing that it's main use will be for games?

For compatibility purposes I would prefer the Philips CD-i 490, because it has the same 68070 processor as most other Philips players (the LG GDI 700 uses an 68341). The 490 also supports a splitter to use two pointing devices and a serial device (modem); I don't know of the 700 supports two pointing devices? Spare parts for the 490 may also be somewhat easier to find...

Other than the above I don't think there's much difference, both players have 32KB of NVRAM and include a DV cartridge.