Tag Archives: cdi

New Team members @ The World of CD-i

At The World of CD-i, each team member knows exactly what to do.
We are in constant contact each other, to define new projects and areas to work on.
That is why we proudly announce 2 new official team members for his respective target.

CD-i Fan, the Emulator creator.
He will exclusively work on the Title Development section, under the Open-Source project, and of course continue with BurnCycle (emulator tester) to make a better experience of his Emulator.

Alan_CDiZone the biggest CD-i lover I ever know!
He will provide some experience of his incredibly huge collection and other material to the site database.
He is the man behind the now sadly closed Philips CD-i Zone Facebook page. He is a very busy man, but he will for sure answer you as soon as possible.

Title Development:
CD-i Fan
English, Nederlands
cdifan@theworldofcdi.com

Titles Information:
Alan_CDiZone
English
alan_cdizone@theworldofcdi.com


Partnership for Live CD-i Streaming Gameplay


CDiArcade is a registered member of this website. He streams CD-i videos gameplay broadcasted other the internet.
His goal is to promote the system and share his passion through the videos. No negativity, he present it in a positive light.
A partnership between The World of CD-i & CDiArcade is now signed to promote his quest and help him to spread the good word all over the world.
The World of CD-i support ideas who can bring new fans to our beloved system.
A Forum section is now available, there you will find announcements of the upcoming streams & support.
Live streaming and Podcasts are already available at Twitch & YouTube.
Each month a live streaming is broadcasted after being promoted under hashtag #CDiDay on Tweeter and then, podcasted to YouTube a few days later.
You can find CDiArcade on:
#CDiDay
Tweeter
Twitch
YouTube

Don’t miss his next LIVE video about Hotel Mario™ Friday day 26th of April at 22:00 EST time on Twitch (04:00 Lisbon; 05:00 Paris).

ll upcoming dates announcements will be done through the Forum!


Philips CD-i Backup Guide

We proudly upload our famous Philips CD-i Backup Guide under PDF format! 16 pages full of information in a “Do it Yourself” way.
Written by Blurb69 back in 2004, it is now updated to version 3.0.
The objective of the guide was and still is, to avoid using your original titles. We all know the difficulty to find CD-i titles due to high prices and the rarity of some of them. Using a copy of your own discs, you will protect your personal collection!

What’s new on version 3.0?
– Updated new website logo.
– Updated website links.
– Updated all freeware and shareware download links.
– Updated all tests under windows 7 with new screenshots.
– Added “What’s new?”.
– Translation of the Guide to French.

The French version was asked by so many people that it was impossible not to do it for them.

Download Now!
– English version
– French version


Philips patents lawsuit against Nintendo


This is not a news due to the fact it is from 2014.

Let’s make a short resume of what happened.
Philips accused Nintendo for violate at least 2 patents from 1996, used on Nintendo’s gaming next generation consoles.
Philips filed a suit against Nintendo back in 2012 in the UK and Germany, then in 2013 in France and finally in the USA in 2014.

The 1st patent said to be infringed describes a virtual body control device that models a user’s body in a virtual environment and lets an animated version of the body follow physical movements of the user.

The 2nd patent describes a user interface system based on a pointing device that lets users give commands to another device by moving it in a particular way.

Philips sent a warning to Nintendo about the 1st patent violation back in 2011, but the Japanese company never tried to get the rights of it, and then with the Wii U, the 2nd patent got also violated.

With this lawsuit, Philips wanted to stop importations and sells of the Nintendo consoles in the 4 countries and get compensation for damages.

In 20th of June of 2014 the Judge Colin Birss from UK patents tribunal ruled the violation of the patents 498 and 650 under the following consoles and systems:
Nintendo Wii, Wii Mini, Wii U and accessories Wii Remote, Wii Motion Plus controllers, Nunchuk, Balance Board and GamePad.

In December of the same year Philips confirmed a settlement with Nintendo that involves a cross-licensing agreement that spans the patent portfolios of both companies. The other terms and all financial details were withheld.

“We are very pleased to have reached this agreement with Nintendo,” said Brain Hinman, chief IPO officer at Philips. “It demonstrates that both companies recognize the importance of intellectual property rights. It also shows the value of our extensive IP portfolio and our commitment to protect our significant investments in research and development.”

This is clear proof of a possible development of a possible CD-i 2 or similar system back in 1996 but unfortunatly, never made.

A definitive proof of being far ahead is time…


Reborn Community


Dedicated websites only got news once or twice a year and forums were really calm.
That was what people who were searching for news faced.

Times are changing, that is why for more than 10 years Facebook Groups (FBG) was chosen by all kinds of people (CD-i lovers or just curious).
I can absolutely confirm that the pioneer of this way of spread the good word came from Alan with his Philips CD-i Zone (now sadly closed since early 2019). This is absolutely insane when you know this guy don’t like Facebook and don’t have any opened account…!

It’s good to see activity again in our Community!
It’s good to see how our return woke up people and gave them more strength!
It’s good to see healthy concurrency!
It’s good to see people talking about CD-i again!

Everything is good? Of course it isn’t. We have to be careful, sometimes the will to do everything at once can brings you back again to the same point before.
The Compact Disc Interactive is indeed a dead system, no way to deny this fact. Nothing we can do will bring him back to life again like in the 90’s. We are not talking about a Sony PlayStation 3 or 4 with tons of websites trying to rule the world of information. We are just talking about CD-i, yes, CD-i this amazing system that nobody understood how powerful it was for its time… We are talking about only a few websites you can count in one hand, and maybe more FBG than websites…

So, It’s good to see concurrency, but with respect and truth.
Like someone told me some weeks ago, time make things change.
I am still hoping this can happen.

In the name of all the people who are behind me and without who it would not be possible to bring this website back to life. Enjoy this website and any other places that talks about your beloved system!


RetroMan’s special boxes pictures

Let’s follow with more RetroMan’s contribution with pictures of part of his collection.
We are now focussed in the special boxes. Many boxes have been released in limited editions, here are few:

Once again, thank you RetroMan, for the trust you gave to us and also for your patience!


Roller Controller repair

Your CD-i Roller Controller isn’t working?
The pointer doesn’t move at all?
Only the buttons are working?
GREAT! This guide is just for you!

Repair your Roller Controller now!

You can find this guide on the Open-Source section under Hardware Repair submenu.
This is the first repair guide to be published but this is not the 1st repaired.
In fact, more already done repairs will join the same section in a couple of weeks.

Let me remind that we can repair your CD-i players and accessories!
Just contact us to know how!


Secret meeting for unexpected unboxing!


Today, CD-i Fan is meeting Dj Koelkast for an unboxing video shooting somewhere in the Netherlands. Our 2 team members are going to unbox a package sent from Greece and full of…
… You will have to wait for the video release to know exactly what is inside!

In march of this year I (Omegalfa) managed to find something lost in time and not known from CD-i customers. Only today, after many attempts to unbox it, they finally found a day. Unfortunately, I am not able to be there to be part of this very important day.

Dj Koelkast, our video professional, have prepared a studio with everything needed for testing and copying the original material.

CD-i Fan our ex-CD-i programmer brought more hardware and will explain what will be extracted from the box and try all that he can.

Get ready, really unexpected and exciting news brought to you by The World of CD-i!


Sonic Eraser – Unreleased CD-i game?


I couldn’t confirm this information on any magazine articles from the era, so I can’t say if this is true story.
In 1991 Sega decided to jump into the online gaming, not like today with multiplayer online games, (this is a CD-i revolution with Ram Raid) no, just to download exclusive games.
To be able to do such a thing you needed some quite specific things.
– 1st, you needed to live in Japan or Brazil.
– 2nd, you needed a Sega Mega Drive.
– 3rd, you needed a Mega Modem add-on.
– 4th, you needed a Meganet subscription.
– 5th, you needed a game called Toshokan (or Sega Game Library).
This is where Sonic Eraser was available to download.
Well, nothing really special… very easy…

So what does it have to see with CD-i?
I found over the net some sites who claims that a Game Gear and a CD-i version was planed (as I said, I still can’t find any proof of that).

This is game developed by Sega, up to 2 players like Columns or Puyo Puyo.
The game was only available for a very limited world zone, so unknown for almost everybody until February 2004 when Sonic KulT website managed to get the Rom.
It will be hard to confirm the possible CD-i project due to the specificity of the game (Japan/Brazil zone & Online).
To be true, this means CD-i could also get a game from Sega Mascot, Sonic! Just like Philips did with Zelda’s and Mario!

You can try the game using the online emulator from Let’s Play Sega!

Source:
Nostallgia (Brazilian Blog)
Sonic Scene


The 7th Guest – Remastered


Well, as we are in the middle of Halloween festivities, here is some creepy news!
The Israeli game developer company MojoTouch released the 20th Anniversary of The 7th Guest in a remastered edition!
The game has been released in 2015 for Android, available at Google Play for 4,59€, and game received its latest update on 29th February 2016 for version 1.0.0.8-11.

Number 2 in the USA and Top 10 in more than 84 countries, the success made MojoTouch decide to export it for Windows and made the 25th Anniversary remastered version in 2019 for 8,19€ (this year)!

Released on 14th April 2015 for AndroidReleased on 2nd April of 2019 for Windows

Watch the official android Trailer:

But how did they manage to make it?
They just found the right guy to make this job… Luc Rooijakkers, ex CD-i programmer from SPC Vision company.
The World of CD-i talked to him in exclusivity about his work for The 7th Guest – 20th Anniversary Remastered.

Luc Rooijakkers:

In July 2014 I got contacted by someone from MojoTouch, an Israeli game company.
They were developing the 20th Anniversary Edition with the IP licensed from Trilobyte and he was looking for someone to extract good quality voice tracks, and also German and French versions.
They were basing the Android version on the PC version, using the existing open-source ScummVM game engine.
Unfortunately quality of the PC audio files left something to be desired and it was only available in English.

He had already gotten out most of the videos using online tools but wanted more.
We did some back and forth on it and agreed on a price after I did some analysis of the game.
It turned out that many audio and video assets where in “processed” CD-i formats and thus not readily extractable using standard tools. After a considerable amount of reverse engineering I was able to extract almost anything that he wanted, except for some games that simple weren’t on the CD-i disc for space reasons.

This included all audio in three languages as well as a number of text screens in those same languages.
At the end of August, after I received payment, I delivered all the extracted assets (many hundreds of megabytes).
We had some general correspondence after that but my work was basically done.

I also provided him with all the game videos in CD-i MPEG format, but they ended up not using them.
The PC video files were a bit better resolution, looked somewhat less “blurred” and with less muted colours.
This came out better after upsampling and conversion to the format they were using.

Interestingly, I found out during the reverse engineering that the CD-i game uses a kind of “compiled” game scripts for all the interactivity, with a very general format and functionality.
It did not in any way look like the ScummVM code, not even in the “opcode” list based on the PC version assets.
My guess is that the CD-i makers re-used an existing “script compiler” architecture and/or game engine and wrote or recompiled all the scripts from scratch.

Due to the generality of the script codes, you could create many different “FMV” games using the same engine; the actual game as released is almost completely data-driven.
This could even be a “portable” engine, all the asset manipulation is in the CD-i specific parts outside the basic script engine and called using generic operators.

In January 2015 I got the official beta version of the 20th Anniversary edition for Android as a courtesy, and it is this version that the screen shots I sent you earlier were taken from.

Earlier this year a 25th Anniversary Edition also appeared on Steam, but it seems to be English audio only with subtitles.

Luc provided us with some pictures taken from the original game files, enjoy!