Articles related to CD-i development
Articles related to CD-i development
This is a collections of articles that I found helpful for CD-i development:
Programming the CD-i Player - Ernest West.
http://cdinteractive.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5
- This is a link to a post on these forums, there is also a word or PDF document somewhere.
The Apprentice - some technical information - cdidev
http://cdidev.tripod.com/apprent.htm
- The lightbulb went on after reading this page. It describes a technique of
using the front plane for sprites (and text), and using the back plane for the static (or nearly static) background.
The New International CD-i Association contains many useful documents:
MCD212 (video decoder and system controller)
http://www.icdia.co.uk/docs/mcd212rev0.zip
- The MCD212 isn't programmed directly, but many of the FCT (field control table) and LCT (line control table) values are directly related to information in this document.
Technical info pointing devices:
http://www.icdia.co.uk/docs/pointing_devices.zip
- This provided a small amount info on input devices. The Green Book contains more details.
Microware OS-9 Documentation - OS-9 2.4 Technical Manual:
http://www.icdia.co.uk/microware/tech/index.html
- Provides documents on system routines such as memory, file and, events.
The Interactive Engineer:
http://www.icdia.co.uk/iengineer/index.html
- Has a few articles relating to game development on the CD-i. The soundmap article was useful. It also provided information on using the CD-RTOS functions in C.
The Green Book is needed, and can be found around the net.
- This describes the CD-i specific routines under OS-9.
Programming the CD-i Player - Ernest West.
http://cdinteractive.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5
- This is a link to a post on these forums, there is also a word or PDF document somewhere.
The Apprentice - some technical information - cdidev
http://cdidev.tripod.com/apprent.htm
- The lightbulb went on after reading this page. It describes a technique of
using the front plane for sprites (and text), and using the back plane for the static (or nearly static) background.
The New International CD-i Association contains many useful documents:
MCD212 (video decoder and system controller)
http://www.icdia.co.uk/docs/mcd212rev0.zip
- The MCD212 isn't programmed directly, but many of the FCT (field control table) and LCT (line control table) values are directly related to information in this document.
Technical info pointing devices:
http://www.icdia.co.uk/docs/pointing_devices.zip
- This provided a small amount info on input devices. The Green Book contains more details.
Microware OS-9 Documentation - OS-9 2.4 Technical Manual:
http://www.icdia.co.uk/microware/tech/index.html
- Provides documents on system routines such as memory, file and, events.
The Interactive Engineer:
http://www.icdia.co.uk/iengineer/index.html
- Has a few articles relating to game development on the CD-i. The soundmap article was useful. It also provided information on using the CD-RTOS functions in C.
The Green Book is needed, and can be found around the net.
- This describes the CD-i specific routines under OS-9.
- K1ngArth3r
- Sum Zero Barman
- Posts: 357
- Joined: Mon Aug 25, 2008 12:16 pm
- Location: Derbyshire, England
I have a CD-i 605 player, but mainly used the CD-i emulator. I only used the CD-i 605 player to track down an obscure bug.K1ngArth3r wrote:Thanks for the resources, just what I was looking for.
What other tools did you use? Did you just use PC Applications or did you use actual CD-i authoring hardware?
I did use a few different player for speed comparisons. This is the only real need for hardware.
- K1ngArth3r
- Sum Zero Barman
- Posts: 357
- Joined: Mon Aug 25, 2008 12:16 pm
- Location: Derbyshire, England
- K1ngArth3r
- Sum Zero Barman
- Posts: 357
- Joined: Mon Aug 25, 2008 12:16 pm
- Location: Derbyshire, England
They were released in France, or more specific it was a French company that made them. In my memory they were a bit buggy, they either work in W95 or W98 not both. I also had some problems with using a PC-mouse in CD-i games and certain display modes crash the card. It's quite usefull, with the card installed you can access contents of cd-i discs with your PC.
- K1ngArth3r
- Sum Zero Barman
- Posts: 357
- Joined: Mon Aug 25, 2008 12:16 pm
- Location: Derbyshire, England
- K1ngArth3r
- Sum Zero Barman
- Posts: 357
- Joined: Mon Aug 25, 2008 12:16 pm
- Location: Derbyshire, England
I2M PCI cards
I programmed a lot of CD-i professional titles and used the I2M PCI cards extensively. Never had any problems with them - they are really pretty nice PCI cards. I believe that we did get the card drivers working on an NT system in addition to Win95/98, although there were a lot of gyrations necessary to get that to work.
I2M cards
I still have all the versions made of the I2M cards - PC/Mac PCI and ISA and the software for them. There were not a huge number of software releases for I2M and there do appear to be 2 or 3 versions posted. Interestingly as well you could piece together a complete CD-i OS9 kernel rom from the files contained in the distribution, as they essentially put CD-i player hardware on a PCI board with some shared memory mapping and loaded the kernel from those files for playback with some slightly modified drivers. Yet another CD-i player to emulate...