CD-i Emulator featured on RetroGaming Radio!!

Post by **Devin** » Tue Nov 08, 2005 11:04 pm

Thanks to Paul for this news!!

CD-i Emulator gets a mention on this months RetroGaming Radio, it's almost a 4 hour show so I haven't got to the part about CD-i Emulator yet

I'll let you know what's covered on this episode when i've finished listening.

Post by **Devin** » Wed Nov 09, 2005 11:18 pm

Time Index 2 Hours 30 Minutes if anybody is interested.

cdifan · Post by **cdifan** » Thu Nov 10, 2005 11:44 pm

Nice! He doesn't go into the emulator very deeply, but it's still interesting.

Anybody want to do a transliteration?

Post by **Devin** » Fri Nov 11, 2005 8:37 am

I'm not very fluent in American

christw · Post by **christw** » Fri Nov 11, 2005 10:06 am

cdifan wrote:Nice! He doesn't go into the emulator very deeply, but it's still interesting.

Anybody want to do a transliteration?

RetroGaming Radio wrote:Hey, now, here's something interesting, something brand new. It deals with classic emulation. The first Philips CD-i (Compact Disc Interactive) emulator is up and running! And you can get it. All you gotta do is figure out how to get the system ROMs, which I'm sure you can get them. If you own an original CDi or ofcourse if you happen to know where to get them, you can actually run Philips CDi software right here on this emulator. For those of you who aren't familiar with the CDi, it was a botched attempt from Philips to bring an interactive compact disc media/gaming/entertainment center. Back in the old school days I believe early nineties, let me see if there's an actual date on here, when this guy came out. It was a nice idea. They had the right idea in mind, but at that point in time you just, you couldn't pull it off. Now, many of you probably know that the CDi had a full-motion video cartridge, you could actually watch real movies like Video-CDs, they came up with their own standard for video compression, I can't remember it was called like white book or orange book format. In any event, they basically encrypted it, they said well, these discs are only gonna play with the CDi, you're not gonna be able to play them on any other players, etcetera, etcetera, and funny enough, and, those of you who've been around a while know the backstory of this. The Commodore CD32 was a competetive product that also had a limited release of full-motion video cart as well. And, at the last minute, before anybody even saw it coming, Commodore's technicians managed to crack the encryption system on these orange book, or whatever it was, format, and they actually managed to include playback of that format inside of the Commodore CD32, which ofcourse pissed Philips off to no end, which is probably part of the deal, I'm sure they have their... I'm sure that's part of the reason why they dit it, was to piss them off. But in any event, I still have a couple of those games, a couple of those movies, Addams Family Values and Star Trek VI, The Undiscovered Country. I actually have those on a format that will play on the CD32 if you've got a full motion video catridge. They will not, in fact, play in a Video DVD player, or a VideoCD player, they won't play on a computer. The only way that I was able to get to the video on that was to extract the MPEG frames manually. Interesting stuff, I mean there's an interesting lore behind all of this old video compression and old file formats. It's worth looking in to. But, anyway, this is the first time that we actually have had an opportunity to see the Philips CDi as an emulator. Now, I'm not sure what you'll play on it, there were several interactive titles for the CDi. In fact, I almost had to buy one because the Philips CDi was one of the first gaming style consoles that would actually play a realistic looking version of Dragon's Lair and Space Ace. You guys know me, I'm a slut for the Dragon's Lair and a slut for the Space Ace, so this would have been my way of getting in on that.

Post by **Devin** » Fri Nov 11, 2005 10:50 am

Nice one!

Post by **Bas** » Fri Nov 11, 2005 12:12 pm

yes, nice! How did you do that? You didn't type that all by yourself, did you?

maybe it's nice to extract this part of the radio and host it as mp3 or something?

christw · Post by **christw** » Fri Nov 11, 2005 2:42 pm

Bas wrote:yes, nice! How did you do that? You didn't type that all by yourself, did you?

Well, yes, AFAIK speech-to-text is not able to do this (yet!)

Bas wrote:maybe it's nice to extract this part of the radio and host it as mp3 or something?

Uhm, well, if you'd tell me where to leave the MP3, I'd be happy to make one for you...

cdifan · Post by **cdifan** » Fri Nov 11, 2005 2:43 pm

There are a few factual errors in this, but it's still a nice piece

It's Green instead of Orange book, but you all know that.

The part about the "Digital Video on CD-i" format being encrypted is wrong; there was no encryption involved, just a custom (non-standardized) data format. The MPEG was unencrypted but not exactly in White Book format. Apparently the CD32 developers reverse-engineered the format (I don't think they ran the CD-i application on the disc). One of the niceties of the "DV on CD-i" format was multi-language, overlayed, subtitles, like DVD, which VideoCD (White Book) didn't have (it has no support for overlays and has to include the subtitles in the MPEG).

Star Trek IV and Addams Family Values are obviously not games, either.

Post by **Bas** » Fri Nov 11, 2005 3:03 pm

christw wrote: Uhm, well, if you'd tell me where to leave the MP3, I'd be happy to make one for you...

Mail it to me and i'll host it on the site. Thanks!

Post by **Bas** » Fri Nov 11, 2005 6:05 pm

Thanks Chris!

For those who want to have a quick listen, download the MP3