Any plans for MVC support in the foreseeable future?
Note to admin: we need a drool emoticon
Neko
One more day til september :-)~
One more day til september :-)~
CDi-Fan, how is your release schedule looking?
Any plans for MVC support in the foreseeable future?
Note to admin: we need a drool emoticon
Neko
Any plans for MVC support in the foreseeable future?
Note to admin: we need a drool emoticon
Neko
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cdifan
- CD-i Emulator Author
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Painful question 
I need to do a little bit more compatibility work; as of right now there are still a few kinks in the emulation for the most abundant player models (e.g. no sound from memory for the Mono-II and up players). I hope to have this finished some time this weekend and will then push it to the beta testers for some exercise.
After that, a bit of user interface work needs to be done; if all goes well I expect a public release before the 15th of September. I know this hurts, but please bear with me a little longer...
If things go bad, I will drop a few player models and/or UI features and release as-is; player compatibility updates will be free anyway and there are certain to be some as exotic player versions surface.
Regarding Digital Video cartridge (MPEG) emulation, that's certainly on my list but I won't start on it until the base-case emulation is sound for all "reasonable" players. As of now, there is at least one player "generation" that isn't supported at all, which includes all non-Philips players except the blatant rip-offs and also the Philips CD-i 370 portable player (which is actually a rebranded Goldstar player and should really count as "non-Philips").
When the compatibility work is finished, I will have Devin add a "compatibility chart" to the teaser site.
I need to do a little bit more compatibility work; as of right now there are still a few kinks in the emulation for the most abundant player models (e.g. no sound from memory for the Mono-II and up players). I hope to have this finished some time this weekend and will then push it to the beta testers for some exercise.
After that, a bit of user interface work needs to be done; if all goes well I expect a public release before the 15th of September. I know this hurts, but please bear with me a little longer...
If things go bad, I will drop a few player models and/or UI features and release as-is; player compatibility updates will be free anyway and there are certain to be some as exotic player versions surface.
Regarding Digital Video cartridge (MPEG) emulation, that's certainly on my list but I won't start on it until the base-case emulation is sound for all "reasonable" players. As of now, there is at least one player "generation" that isn't supported at all, which includes all non-Philips players except the blatant rip-offs and also the Philips CD-i 370 portable player (which is actually a rebranded Goldstar player and should really count as "non-Philips").
When the compatibility work is finished, I will have Devin add a "compatibility chart" to the teaser site.
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cdifan
- CD-i Emulator Author
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- Joined: Fri Jun 24, 2005 6:19 am
- Location: The Netherlands
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You'll have to ask Devin about the cost of the cable...
You can download CD-i Link from ICDIA here (its under PC/Windows Downloads, CD-i communication tools). It comes with a description of the required cables in the file cables.txt.
I know of several people who have done the cable themselves, it isn't hard but requires basic soldering skills, of course.
You can download CD-i Link from ICDIA here (its under PC/Windows Downloads, CD-i communication tools). It comes with a description of the required cables in the file cables.txt.
I know of several people who have done the cable themselves, it isn't hard but requires basic soldering skills, of course.
I saw the price of the emu in the other thread. Does that include future updates like when you implement MVC support? Will you accept bugreports and work on these - i.e. will you offer support in future?
Regarding your "compatibility list for players" - if you have good support for the 220, you should have 99.9% compatibility with all software. That was the "base player". A title always will/should work on a 220 (developers usually had just a 220 to test their programmes on so...;you can use just the last edition, the 220/60). When a new player was released we'd also test our archive of software to see if old titles would work well. Very rarely did we encounter problems there, usually Philips would make changes if something was found. Same for MPEG cartridges, we tested afaik for vmpeg and impeg versions (probably older ones too but may have been before my time)
So from the software point of view, it's not really necessary to support all players. Of course, if you're interested in emulating all players from a developer or hardware enthusiasts point of view...
Neko
Regarding your "compatibility list for players" - if you have good support for the 220, you should have 99.9% compatibility with all software. That was the "base player". A title always will/should work on a 220 (developers usually had just a 220 to test their programmes on so...;you can use just the last edition, the 220/60). When a new player was released we'd also test our archive of software to see if old titles would work well. Very rarely did we encounter problems there, usually Philips would make changes if something was found. Same for MPEG cartridges, we tested afaik for vmpeg and impeg versions (probably older ones too but may have been before my time)
So from the software point of view, it's not really necessary to support all players. Of course, if you're interested in emulating all players from a developer or hardware enthusiasts point of view...
Neko
I see. *edit2* Forget it, just ranting. I was thinking of another emu that had ROM built-in and just used the extra ROM the user had to provide as "unlock" key.
*edit* I strongly advise NOT to use 180 or any of the portables ROMs - plenty of problems with those in real hardware, and we dont' want "realistically emulated problems"
Neko
*edit* I strongly advise NOT to use 180 or any of the portables ROMs
- plenty of problems with those in real hardware, and we dont' want "realistically emulated problems"Neko
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cdifan
- CD-i Emulator Author
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- Joined: Fri Jun 24, 2005 6:19 am
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KuroNeko is right in that supporting all Philips 220 models will cover most variations of the Philips CD-i line; the various revisions of the player (/00 to /80) used all the major board types (Mini-MMC and Mono-I to IV). Not that this really cuts down on the amount of work to be done; so far I've found that the variations between player models using the same board type are pretty minor such as a different front LED display or NVRAM size. The variations between board types (or rather, between the chips used on those boards) vary from minor to very major.
However, it assumes that I have all those players! So far I'm still missing *any* information on 220/00, 220/20 and 220/80. So for this reason alone I'm testing with any player ROM I can get my hands on.
But Merijn is also right in that I want the emulator to pretty much work with the ROM from *any* CD-i player out there. When the particular board type is already supported this mostly amounts to finetuning the player model and board type detection logic (which is driven from a configuration file), or at least it has been this way so far.
But there's also a Mono-VI board out there (this doesn't appear to differ much from Mono-III or IV, however, which so far seem to be identical for emulation purposes). And then there's the Maxi-MMC used by the 180 (no data so far) and the "Goldstar" board used in the Philips 370 and all the non-Philips players that I've seen so far.
Also, I don't agree with KuroNeko about the "realistically emulated problems", a good emulator will reproduce them
Many of these problems are ROM bugs, not hardware problems, and they would be hard for the emulator to avoid anyway! Not that I really want to at this point...
On the DVC side, there's IMPEG and VMPEG but also the "Gate Array" MPEG cartridge which comes in *four* versions (AH00 to AH03, several of these are probably similar, but I haven't looked at them yet). And at least one non-Philips player appears to have a DVC of its own (others use either IMPEG or VMPEG).
If you want some idea of the bewildering variety of players out there, I suggest you check The Complete CD-i Players Overview from the ICDIA site here and look at the CD-i player types and Which DV cartridge is in a 605? articles in Volume 5, Number 5 of the Interactive Engineer here (also on ICDIA). Note that both of these references are incomplete and at least one of them is partially incorrect
Enough information for you techno-types out there?
However, it assumes that I have all those players! So far I'm still missing *any* information on 220/00, 220/20 and 220/80. So for this reason alone I'm testing with any player ROM I can get my hands on.
But Merijn is also right in that I want the emulator to pretty much work with the ROM from *any* CD-i player out there. When the particular board type is already supported this mostly amounts to finetuning the player model and board type detection logic (which is driven from a configuration file), or at least it has been this way so far.
But there's also a Mono-VI board out there (this doesn't appear to differ much from Mono-III or IV, however, which so far seem to be identical for emulation purposes). And then there's the Maxi-MMC used by the 180 (no data so far) and the "Goldstar" board used in the Philips 370 and all the non-Philips players that I've seen so far.
Also, I don't agree with KuroNeko about the "realistically emulated problems", a good emulator will reproduce them
Many of these problems are ROM bugs, not hardware problems, and they would be hard for the emulator to avoid anyway! Not that I really want to at this point...On the DVC side, there's IMPEG and VMPEG but also the "Gate Array" MPEG cartridge which comes in *four* versions (AH00 to AH03, several of these are probably similar, but I haven't looked at them yet). And at least one non-Philips player appears to have a DVC of its own (others use either IMPEG or VMPEG).
If you want some idea of the bewildering variety of players out there, I suggest you check The Complete CD-i Players Overview from the ICDIA site here and look at the CD-i player types and Which DV cartridge is in a 605? articles in Volume 5, Number 5 of the Interactive Engineer here (also on ICDIA). Note that both of these references are incomplete and at least one of them is partially incorrect
Enough information for you techno-types out there?
The cable will probably end up costing around nine to ten pounds which I know is expensive, however it is very close to the cost to me for production of these. I'll probably throw in a free game with the first ten orders making sure it's compatible with the emulator when converted into ISO form of course!! Cables will be on sale from sunday through The CD-i Store and in conjunction with cdilink will allow you to upload the ROM from your CD-i player to PC.oaacdi wrote:I want to be the first customer to buy/download the emulator!
This cable should cover most commercial CD-i players, other versions like the developmental systems or later models including the LG GDI700 and DVS DVE-200 require different cables.