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I just purchased this on eBay. I have never seen it before, so I figured it's probably uncommon. Doing a search for it on this forum also brings me little information. My question is: Did I overpay? My intuition says it's probably worth it, at least from a collectibility standpoint. I was interested in it for that, but also the size of the unit. I am limited on space and had to pack up the 450 last night to make room for my 3DO, however, with the size of this smaller player, I may be able to keep this CD-i out alongside it.

Ebay link: http://www.ebay.com/itm/280789144771?ss ... 1497.l2649

Wow, that's cool! I have never seen one for real. I only know they existed and they are mentioned on my website, by the way. Kyocera was one of the co-developers of Philips for the very first 180 players.
Did you get it with the optional LCD screen?
I think you paid a good price for it. I would've given just as much, or maybe even more.

I am pretty sure it's just the base unit with the unique pointing device and the hookups. It looks like it will need some cleaning-up too, but as long as it works I don't mind!

Hey, that's a pretty cool looking unit! And the small size makes it ideal for console collectors.

If it truely has DVS support then it seems like a nice system if you're looking for a CDi player (lmk when you get it b/c I'm a little curous). Saw one sell for about $50 on ebay but that was quite awhile ago, if you're looking for that model then I'd say it's worth grabbing it.

Well, I received it today! It cleaned up very nicely and it really feels like a tough unit. Games seem to load fine, and the menu interface for the system isn't too bad (although not quite as nice as the Philiips one as I saw some say in older posts). It's also tiny, which is great.

The downer: There's no DVC in this thing, even though it was advertised by the seller. Blah.

It's an interesting little system though. Manufactured in Japan during May 1994 from what the bottom of the system says. Built like a rock from what I can tell, and it uses 1/8" jacks for it's audio and video-out. It also has an I/O port, plus the Mic port for the Karaoke stuff (no karaoke options built into the system though, so I guess this was done through external software or on a karaoke CD). It also has a "video-in" port, which is the most-interesting feature.

Doing a little more testing, it seems like they dislike CD-R media as well.

that's too bad that there is no DVS functionality, something I've been wondering since I saw the unit on the CDi hardware page. Yeah I saw the sellers advertisment and I would've always assumed it was DVS-enabled had there been no information otherwise. Still a very obscure model CDi player to come accross.

Guess you'd need a GPI 1100 for a nice mini-CDi player with DVS functionality... now that I think about it there have been far fewer auctions for obscure CDi players lately than there were just a year or so ago.

You are right, I haven't seen many specialty CD-i players show up lately. I'd definitely like to get one of the Sony ones in the future, but I haven't seen one in a while.

Austin, congratulations on finding such a cool and rare cd-i player.

I'm sorry to hear it doesn't have DVC capability. Is it an NTSC player?

I think this has to be the rarest one, along with the Bang & Olufsen - would you agree?

The only other time I saw one was in an auction in USA where the seller had it as part of a huge auction which made thousands.

Best wishes
Alan

Thanks, Alan! It is a NTSC player.

I can't comment on its rarity, as I am not quite as familiar with all the units out there as everyone else here. I will say, in the last year and a half that I have been searching for CD-i goods (which is at least once a week at the very least, many times more often), I haven't seen it come up. I've seen many portable CD-i players pop up during that same time frame though.

A small update (and some possible bad news)--

I decided to hook this up today again to capture some footage. I ran into some issues though. Trying three games, one wouldn't load at all (Pyramid Adventures). The other two games, Lemmings and Zenith, failed to load certain background elements (usually the main part of the playfield, leaving a mostly black screen on both titles asides from your menu/scores).

I don't know if this is a problem with the player itself (faulty, perhaps?), or if maybe there were cost-cutting measures made and it's not capable of playing standard games (clearly it was designed solely for professional use, so that doesn't seem far-off to me).

Austin wrote:A small update (and some possible bad news)--

I decided to hook this up today again to capture some footage. I ran into some issues though. Trying three games, one wouldn't load at all (Pyramid Adventures). The other two games, Lemmings and Zenith, failed to load certain background elements (usually the main part of the playfield, leaving a mostly black screen on both titles asides from your menu/scores).

I don't know if this is a problem with the player itself (faulty, perhaps?), or if maybe there were cost-cutting measures made and it's not capable of playing standard games (clearly it was designed solely for professional use, so that doesn't seem far-off to me).

Uh oh ... have you found out any more info? Does it have these quirks w/many games?

I have only tried a couple of games with it (primarily the ones I mentioned). Sometime in the future I will spend an afternoon testing out all of the games I have to see what works and what doesn't. I am most interested in finding whether my system is damaged in some way, or if perhaps it lacks elements that "normal" CD-i players feature, causing certain games to not display properly. Regardless, I will post my findings here when I get to it.

By the way--one thing that does work is the backup/save feature. Of all the things...