development with the 605
Posted: Mon Dec 07, 2009 2:39 pm
Yeah I agree that it was possible to upload and run software on the regular CD-i players in the same way, although we rarely used that capability except when we were developing something somewhat hardware specific, for example when I was developing the interface for displaying information on the LED front panel displays for the CD-i players. You are also correct that we had to renumber the SCSI IDs to avoid addressing conflicts and proper bus termination was always tricky. I had written software for the PC side to deal with keeping the cache updated - you mainly had to make sure you weren't hitting the drive from both sides at once to keep from corrupting the FAT. I also have the hard drive emulator hardware system which attaches to the 605 system (which is actually another OS9 based package). That was always a bit of a pain to use, so would find alternatives wherever possible. Once the I2Ms were available we used those most of the time for development as that made it much easier to deal with overall. Before the 605's were available I used the CDI-18x series players for development.
A lot of the development on the professional side focused on titles that made extensive use of the DVC, as we were essentially replacing touch screen / videodisc-pc combination systems with cd-i players and video was an essential part of that equation. There was quite a bit of development that went into dealing with proper encoding, mastering and playback of FMV, and we developed code to allow us to enter and exit FMV streams at specific I frame entry points and in some cases cache-ahead streams being switched between that allowed for seamless switching of fmv streams on the disc. I also developed a lot utilities for extracting and color-match-converting frames from the encoded FMV streams to DYUV/RGB888 and which allowed us to seamlessly transition to and from FMV between graphic frames for interactions. I also had developed capabilities for overlay popup controls for FMV which allowed forward/reverse scan, slow/fast motion, step, pause/play, and branching (i.e. back/next) within titles. I mentioned some other things I think in a post in another forum. I included some of these capabilities in CD-i capability demo discs we developed for Philips Professional Media.
I wonder if Philips would be ok with posting cd-i images here of demo discs they produced that were not sold but rather given away? I wouldn't think there should be a problem with that. They may be good images for testing system capabilities, and some people may be interested in seeing them. I've been having some discussions with Devin on posting some CD-i utilities, code, etc.
One of the original demo discs that Philips produced for the FMV card had some source code embedded (intentionally, although not documented anywhere) as files in the file system that gave a leg up to developers who were developing code for the DVC cards. The Green Book extensions were not really very helpful always in terms of practical issues surrounding use of DVC capabilities. We also repurposed allocated FMV buffers when they were not in active use to be able to maximize the memory utilization/capabilites of the system for interactive/graphic content in FMV titles.
A lot of the development on the professional side focused on titles that made extensive use of the DVC, as we were essentially replacing touch screen / videodisc-pc combination systems with cd-i players and video was an essential part of that equation. There was quite a bit of development that went into dealing with proper encoding, mastering and playback of FMV, and we developed code to allow us to enter and exit FMV streams at specific I frame entry points and in some cases cache-ahead streams being switched between that allowed for seamless switching of fmv streams on the disc. I also developed a lot utilities for extracting and color-match-converting frames from the encoded FMV streams to DYUV/RGB888 and which allowed us to seamlessly transition to and from FMV between graphic frames for interactions. I also had developed capabilities for overlay popup controls for FMV which allowed forward/reverse scan, slow/fast motion, step, pause/play, and branching (i.e. back/next) within titles. I mentioned some other things I think in a post in another forum. I included some of these capabilities in CD-i capability demo discs we developed for Philips Professional Media.
I wonder if Philips would be ok with posting cd-i images here of demo discs they produced that were not sold but rather given away? I wouldn't think there should be a problem with that. They may be good images for testing system capabilities, and some people may be interested in seeing them. I've been having some discussions with Devin on posting some CD-i utilities, code, etc.
One of the original demo discs that Philips produced for the FMV card had some source code embedded (intentionally, although not documented anywhere) as files in the file system that gave a leg up to developers who were developing code for the DVC cards. The Green Book extensions were not really very helpful always in terms of practical issues surrounding use of DVC capabilities. We also repurposed allocated FMV buffers when they were not in active use to be able to maximize the memory utilization/capabilites of the system for interactive/graphic content in FMV titles.