MiSTer FPGA Forum

I nabbed a CD-i for about $18 shipped. It has a wonky drive and no video add-on board though. I can get to the boot screen so at least from what I've learned, the battery is still alive. I can see why people don't want to spend the money on the system as just a curiosity. Also, some models really look like a vcr so a FPGA core on a Mister people already have would in my view be most welcomed.

After looking at the complete library available, I see many non-game video releases that look interesting. Some youtube videos showed Tina Turner and Terminator 2 for example. Though not in the greatest quality, it would be great to watch such concerts and movies on the Mister and mess with the edutainment, as well as the games. Researching the CD-i has made me really anticipate a CD-i core.

Anyone else here feel the same and not just from a "why not" or "meh, but cool" state of mind?

I can't claim a particular passion for it, but CD-i is definitely more interesting than it's usually given credit for. It basically bombed in the consumer market, but it seems that there was a lot of corporate momentum behind it several years before it was (re)branded and released in a consumer-oriented form, and some of that carried over via oddly high-profile/high-budget brands and titles showing up on the platform (e.g. adaptations of Jeopardy! and The Joker's Wild! with the hosts actually reading the questions in voiceover). Basically, there was a time when CD-i was expected (at least by some people in some industries) to be the "serious" interactive media platform, contrasting with video game consoles that were seen as toys.

The actual CD-i specification is readily available, but a lot of it specifies an operating system API corresponding to a particular vintage of OS-9, which is still proprietary with no (to my knowledge) open-source clone available. So as a core implementer I guess one basically has their choice between reproducing the particular (unspecified/non-standardized) hardware of a player and leveraging its ROM, or cloning the OS to suit a hardware platform that could have existed but never actually did. On the emulation side of things, it looks like one of the MAME drivers (cdimono1) is "working", but I don't know how serious its limitations are.

I did some development for CD-i as an intern, in the early nineties. It did have some nice capabilities at the time, like being able to display two 128-color planes and a delta-yuv mode which could alter hue, saturation or brightness per pixel, that worked well for displaying photos. And of course it could display 'full motion video', mpeg 1 video, which was brand new at the time. The company where I was an intern made some really polished looking (using SGI machines for 3D graphics and other high end graphics machines) serious applications for it, mostly educational, like interactive encyclopedia, documentaries and titles for children.

I would really like to see a CDi core. Getting a working CDi these days is expensive and not easy, and a lot of the models are massive and prone to breakdown. The library may not be top tier for gaming, but I really hope people start to take on the late 4th and early 5th gen CD based systems. Most of them fall into the same boat of not having the best libraries, but are expensive and dying and would be great to have preserved and be able to check out the library without spending a fortune and be stuck in recap hell like I am with the 3DO I recently purchased.

CD-I is so infamous, I would understand low interest. But I would really like a CD-I core. I think it's a import system for gaming history.