(The CD-i catalogue contain more games like this) Mad Dog McCree™, used to be also on many video arcade stores. A full-motion interactive movie. The 7th Guest, famous game converted to the system. Using the DVC an extra 1Mb memory RAM was used by the CD-i. Most of them use the Digital Video Cartridge (DVC). With that, CD-i never had the chance to get competitive games against other consoles, but we can name a few awesomes. The following pictures are taken from the CD-i 210/40. But the configuration of the machine was never designed to play games like other consoles, some high limitations had to be overcome by game developers.īefore the CD-i launch, the deal between Philips and some Japanese game producers was cancelled and Philips quickly had to find new developers, some of them without any real experience in gaming production.
The early games weren’t that good and we needed to wait until 1994 to see good games with great graphics after Philips noticed what people really wanted. In theory a very good idea, but the high price of the players (hardware) and titles (software) spooked consumers too much.
Children can play educational games, teenagers escape to games, and adults have the possibility to use multimedia titles like dictionaries, visit museums, learn guitar playing, photography, new languages or watch a movie with the family. The original Philips idea was to place the whole family in front of the television and interact between them and the CD-i player.Īs said above, this is not a console. The CD-i 450, created to make a console look and compete against 3DO and Sega CD32. Operating system CD-RTOS (Microware OS-9)
The CD-i started to be commercialized near the end of 1991 in the USA and early of 1992 in Europe for around $1000 (very expensive for that time).Īny brand could manufacture, a license was needed, and had to respect the minimal specifications.īasic CD-i specifications (depending on different models):ĭVC extension MPEG-1 offering 1Mb extra RAM
This technology brings a new dimension never seen before with the interactivity between the user and the player, using a simple TV screen, and also able to be connected to a Hi-Fi sound surround system with audio CD quality! The player is the very 1st to get an Internet connection ( Web-i & CD-Online) with a modem and play a multiplayer game ( RAM Raid)! The format has been developed between Philips, Sony and Matsushita back in 1987, and is specified in the Green Book (“Red book” for the audio CD and “Yellow book” for the CD ROM) which contains all the specifications of a CD-i player and protocols. and i don't really care enough about this obscure system to go through any further experimentation, this was already more than you can expect from the regular pleb to get this stuff working.The CD caddy used with some players can hold a 8cm and 12cm size disc.
unless you download the big software list MAME set (you can maybe just download the CD-i games, but with that naming scheme i don't know which files would even be required) i see no way how you could get this to work. I've seen people who did get it to work on youtube, but even those videos are years old and any tutorial there seems to be for MESS and therefore useless today. That said i could never get MAME to work through retroarch to begin with and am just using the stand-alone (for regular arcade stuff), so i'm not really surprised that none of the mame stuff worked like this here either.Īlso, apparently the CD-i emulation was mostly done years ago for MESS before it was merged with MAME so there is practically no up-to-date documentation, you can find some year old tutorials for the old MESS versions, and there is just ONE guy who works on CD-i at MAME now (or so it seems), but even the emulation in MAME (if you can get it to work) is still in the experimental stage and a few important things, i think FMV playback was the one big one thing missing, so videos, the entire schtick the system was build around just isn't implemented at all yet? i don't know exactly. CHD files, but still not the correct filenames.
and even that version where everything was pre-build just didn't work. I even downloaded a pre-made Launchbox+Rocketlauncher+Retroarch set (from some site called arcade punks, they do a lot of pre-made sets, i prefer to make my own) that had CD-i games in it, just to analyze how they did it. The only thing that apparently works is MAME, but i couldn't even get that to work because it expects the roms/images to be in its own specific chd format and it's own filename system or it just doesn't know what that file is, so any REDUMP (or TOSEC) set is simply not functional at this point. I tried to get CD-i to work a few weeks back.