CD-i Stub -- communicate with CD-i player over serial port

CD-i Emulator is the first fully evolving windows compatible emulator project of the Philips CD-i system. Discuss the emulator, compatibility issues, seek help and support to get the program operating and post what you'd like to see in future revisions of the program. CD-i players ROM (BIOS) requests, begging and links will not be tolerated. Otherwise feel free to post your thoughts on this amazing new piece of software.
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Bas
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CD-i Stub -- communicate with CD-i player over serial port

Post by Bas » Wed Jul 13, 2005 9:49 pm

Here are some parts from a topic at Le Monde about the cdilink program which may be of some help to people....

[Edited by cdifan to remove no longer relevant parts]
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Here is a small extract from the documentation included with CD-i Link:

The primary purpose of cdilink is to upload the system ROMs from a CD-i player to a PC, but you can also upload or download other files and display information about the CD-i player. This allows you to inspect and modify the contents of the player NVRAM (e.g., highscore files) and to inspect the contents of CD-i discs.

The CD-i system ROMs are copyrighted and cannot be freely redistributed, but uploading them for your own use should be allowed.

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I'm like dying to find out how the 604 differs from my two 605's.

Your 604 should have four "serial" port interfaces, right? Two MiniDIN-8, one on the front and one on the back, and two DB9, both on the back. One of these ports will should emit copyright messages at 9600 baud when the player boots, that's the one you need to use for cdilink. It's probably the DB9 one marked "Input 3" or something, in which case you're lucky because a standard PC nullmodem cable should work. Otherwise you'll have to get a "CD-i" nullmodem cable. If you can't find the copyright messages, you'll have to try all ports in turn.

Download the CD-i Link distribution, unpack it, start a DOS window, go to the cdilink directory, connect the cable and type "cdilink -info". When cdilink says "Waiting for stub", turn on your player. The program should recognize your player and start downloading the information, which it will write to a text file in the current directory. The text file is what I'm after, it shouldn't be very large (around 14K for my 605). You can find my mail address in the documentation that comes with cdilink.

The above assumes that you connected the cable to COM1; for COM2 use "cdilink -port 2 -info" instead.

Now, that was easy, no? It is all described in the documentation coming with the CD-i Stub distribution, with more details and including the cable pinouts.

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