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MESS CD-i emulation (MAME clone)

Posted: Mon Sep 28, 2009 11:45 pm
by cdifan
I have been contacted by two people about assisting the MESS project (a fork of MAME) with their CD-i emulation driver.

Before any of you get their hopes up, I've taken a quick look at the MESS CD-i emulation sources and it seems to be about at the stage where CD-i Emulator was around summer 2003, two years before the public release.

Unfortunately, this is exactly where the hard part begins. Based on a comparison of video emulation sources, I'd say the MESS code is at a few percent completion at most, and this is for video emulation alone, arguably the easiest part of CD-i emulation. So far MESS only emulates the 68070 processor and a small part of the MCD 212 video chips, and these are both documented. From this point on they will hit nothing but undocumented chips (except for a few small support chips such as NVRAM).

However, I am willing to share information; we are currently trying to work out a way to do it.

Posted: Tue Sep 29, 2009 7:51 pm
by K1ngArth3r
Great news, really pleased there is an increasing amount of interest for CDi emulation.

Thanks for sharing

Posted: Wed Sep 30, 2009 8:32 pm
by Devin
Wasn't expecting that!

I'll keep my eyes glued for further developments. Sounds like they mean business anyway! :D

Posted: Thu Oct 01, 2009 12:40 am
by cdifan
If you want to follow the progress, I recommend the MESS message board at http://www.bannister.org/forums/ (forum "MESS", thread "CD-i WIP").

The discussion is fairly technical as the board members are mostly die-hard emulation freaks :-)

Posted: Thu Oct 01, 2009 9:02 pm
by Devin
Your not wrong, I feel a headache coming on!

They have a good mentor anyway :wink:

Posted: Sat Nov 07, 2009 6:04 pm
by cdifan
MESS version 0.135 is out and includes a very reasonable CD-i emulation (it is not bug-free but neither is CD-i Emulator).

MESS CD-i requires one of the following CD-i system ROM (a.k.a. BIOS) files:
  • cdi200.rom - Magnavox CD-i 200
    cdi220b.rom - Philips CD-i 220 F2
This is because it only handles the Mono-I board and these are the only two CD-i players using that board.

You also need to have CD-i disc images in CHD (Compressed Hunks of Data) format, these can be created from CDI/2352 raw disc images with the chdman tool included with MESS/MAME. If you have disc images in another format (supported by CD-i Emulator), you can use the new CD-i File Extractor tool to convert them to this format; it can even invoke chdman for you.

Public beta versions of CD-i Emulator version 0.5.3, incorporating most of the compatibility bugfixes learned during the MESS effort, will start being released soon.

Posted: Sat Nov 07, 2009 11:26 pm
by Devin
cdifan wrote:Public beta versions of CD-i Emulator version 0.5.3, incorporating most of the compatibility bugfixes learned during the MESS effort, will start being released soon.
Really looking forward to this but you just had to time it when all the new toys are being released!

Left 4 Dead 2
Alien Breed Evolution
Black Mesa (with any luck!)

Still room for 0.5.3 though, bring it on :D