About CD-i real tech specs

Anything relating to CD-i can be discussed in this forum. From the multiple hardware iterations of the system to the sofware including games, reference, music and Video CDs. Maybe you hold an interest in Philips Media and the many development houses set up to cater for CD-i if so then this is the forum.
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rst
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About CD-i real tech specs

Post by rst » Wed Mar 15, 2006 12:41 am

Yes, is so hard to find the through about the tech specs.
Naybe the author of the emu can help me.

I need know

Exactly Ram. In some webs it tell 1,5 Mbits but the old info it tell only 1 Mbit
How many sprites it can move on screen at time ?
How many colors in the palette ? with and without cartridge
How many colors on screen ? with and without cartridge
How many units solds worldwide ?

I old info i can read about the digital cartridge can up the Ram to 2,5 Mbits.
That mean 2,5 Mbits is the total with the original 1 Mbit... ?
My old info it tell too about that cartrige make possible the cd-i process
400 Mips. Is that possible ?

Well i hope not fif a lot of questions and not distrub to noone, but i need some real info.


Regards ... RST

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Post by cdifan » Wed Mar 15, 2006 8:26 am

There are several FAQs around that should really answer your technical questions, as they are actually pretty basic. But I'll give it a go anyway...

The original CD-i system (the so-called "base case") has 1 MB of RAM, split in two planes of 512 KB each. Each plane feeds one "layer" of the video decoder in addition to serving as general purpose RAM for the 68000-compatible processor.

The Digital Video cartridge adds another 1.5 MB of RAM; 512 KB of this feeds the MPEG video decoder and is only available as general purpose RAM when the DV functions are not being used. The other 1 MB does not feed any video hardware and is consequently the fastest RAM in the system (no cycle stealing).

Development and some professional players such as the CD-i 180 and CD-i 60x models may have up to 4 MB of additional RAM.

The CD-i video hardware does not support sprites; it's a basic 4 or 8 bits per pixel display using various coding methods including CLUT (Color Look-Up Table, with a size of 128 palette entries per video plane), DYUV (Delta Y-U-V, useful for natural images) and RGB555 (can only be used with both planes at once). There are also run-length encoded versions of the CLUT modes.

There is also something called the Display Control Program from which up to 8 display instructions are executed by each video plane on each horizontal retrace. This allows display mode changes, overlay settings, palette entries etc to change with each line.

So the number of different colors on screen depends on the display mode. In CLUT it is basically either 16 or 128 for each plane (but you can change the palette a little for each line); in DYUV it's theoretically 16777216 and in RGB555 it's 32768.

The DV cartridge adds a single MPEG backdrop layer that cannot be used for other purposes; it uses some form of subsampled YUV colorspace that is not documented.

Just for completeness, the so-called "normal" screen resolution is 384x280 in PAL and 360x240 in NTSC, but you can double this horizontally with the 4-bit CLUT modes and vertically by using interlacing. There is also a compatibility mode that allows you to use 384x240 in NTSC (most games use this).

I don't know anything about the DV cartridge MIPS, though, but it is a basic MPEG-1 decoder so you should be able to find some performance estimates for this. Personally I think 400 MIPS is a bit much, but how do you count MIPSes for dedicated hardware or DSPs?

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Post by rst » Wed Mar 15, 2006 3:52 pm

Thx for the info...

But about the colors on screen, number of colors in the palette and numer of colors on screen, is not clear. You mean it is habitual the games use a palete 16,7 millions of colors and 32768 colors on screen at time ? Is important make 2 2 ways on that.. with the cartridge and without it. Because i am sure with cartridge can get the maximun number, but with it, i feel not enough ram to do that millions of colors.

And about the screen resolution, you told about 384x280, but i saw ins some webs the spec it tell the maximun is 768 x 560. What you think about ? Of course one thing is the habitual on games and supported redsolution, and other is the maximun possible (but never in games)

About the number of mips the cartridge allow... i read that info in the books of the epoch, that mean in 1995. I dont know if that 400 mips is a reality... what you think about ?

that 4 Mbits of ram the models CD-i 180 and CD-i 60x, is adittional or the max number of ram ? I mean if is 4 +1 or 4 the total.

Was the cd-i compatible with NTSC and PAL ? I mean in the same machine.

If the hardware not allow the use of sprites... how the programmeds do graphics in movment ? I cant understand that , if you can explain again please.

Do you know the official numbers of unit solds worldwide ?
and do you the officila date of the release of the cd-i ? Where was? in USA or Europe ?

What was the PC-Bridge ? a program to pcs or a dispossitive ?

How many games released aproximately ?

lol, a lot of questions :P i am sorry

Greetings

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Post by Ruekov » Wed Mar 15, 2006 11:21 pm

Oooh, a profesional spechs of CDi. Thanks !

I add question: ¿ Is DYUV for a videos without DVC ? for example, voyeur or burncycle have a full motion videos but don't need digital-video-cartidge.

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Post by cdifan » Fri Mar 17, 2006 1:27 am

Here are some more technical answers...

The presence of the DV cartridge has nothing to do with the screen colors. Each "layer" of base-case video feeds from its own 512 KB memory area, which makes it impossible to use cartridge memory for base-case video.

And it wouldn't be helpful either; the "normal" screen resolution is one of only a few fixed values (384x280 or 360x280 for PAL, 384x240 or 360x240 for NTSC). You can double this resolution horizontally by using a 4 bit CLUT mode and vertically by using interlacing, but no other variations are possible. The base-case video hardware fetches at most one byte per plane per normal resolution pixel and this cannot be changed. Doubling the default PAL resolution both horizontally and vertically gives the 768x560 resolution you mention, but for NTSC the maximum is only 768x480.

Only a few players can do both NTSC and PAL, the 180 and 60x models being among them. The supported mode is usually determined in hardware; the same system ROMs often support both modes (with CD-i Emulator I found that in some cases a "Philips" player will suddenly change to a "Magnavox" player when you switch it from PAL to NTSC).

The MPEG video "layer" can only display MPEG images (either still pictures or moving video); it is not directly accessible in a documented way.

Most games use the 7-bit CLUT modes in both planes, giving them a total of 256 colors to play with. Sometimes DYUV is used for a special effect or small "movie"; the 16 million colors are delta-coded which makes it impossible to have arbitrary changes in color. RGB555 is hardly ever used; it needs both planes to get the required 15 bit/pixel bandwith from memory (the 16th bit is for transparency control).

If you want more technical information about the base-case video subsystem, I refer you to the Motorola documentation for the Motorola MCD212 Video Decoder and System Controller chip, available in the CD-i Technical Documentation / System section of the ICDIA website. Most newer CD-i players use this chip and it almost exactly implements the Green Book specifications.

Without sprites you can still do movement; PC video hardware doesn't have sprite support either! You just need to erase and redraw a "sprite" image over a background, generally for each video frame. This is just replicating the sprite overlay function in software...

As I stated, the 4 MB for the 180 and 60x players is additional RAM; together with base-case (1 MB) and cartridge (1.5 MB) RAM these players can have up to 6.5 MB total.

CD-Bridge is a CD-XA profile that requires a CD-i application on the disc; VideoCD and PhotoCD are both CD-Bridge applications. This was intended to produce PC compatible CDs, but still requires PC software appropriate for the disc format (this was not normally included on the CDs, although it could be).

You can use DYUV (or CLUT, for that matter) to play "small" videos: it's just a matter of redrawing the appropriate images fast enough. The bottleneck is usually the CD bandwidth, which is at most 170 KB per second as the CD drive runs at single-speed only. Don't know about Voyeur, but Burn:Cycle uses some very clever run-length compression for its videos: they managed to make an artistic asset out of the bandwidth limitations. The video hardware supports run-length decompression for the CLUT3 and CLUT7 modes (8 and 128 colors, respectively; the highest bit is used to control the runs).

I have no answers for your other questions. Perhaps someone else here does?

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Post by rst » Fri Mar 17, 2006 2:38 am

Ok, good info from you :) thx a lot

Bit i not have a thing so clear at this moment. Because i cant imagine how.
Is the number of colors on screen possible to be 16,7 millions ? I think not exist any game with that number of color on screen. Maybe the palette yes but i am not sure about on screen. Please can you confirm that ?

I am not be sure with the date of the first release, 1990 or 1991 ? The first model was the 220, then where come the 180 ?

Regards ... RST

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Post by cdifan » Fri Mar 17, 2006 11:23 pm

The maximum number of pixels on the CD-i screen is 768x560 = 430080, so that is of course the maximum number of simultaneous colors.

I was in all cases referring to the number of possible colors without palette changes, of course. In that case, 24 bits of RGB generated from 24 bits of delta-compressed YUV gives 2^24 = 16777216 colors. I'm not sure if this even was the actual physical color range; the RGB palette registers for the CLUT modes where documented as having only 3x6 = 18 significant color bits, but nothing was documented about the number of significant color bits for DYUV.

The CD-i 180 was the first player, but it was only used for development and never sold on the consumer market. It consisted of three stacked boxes and was quite bulky. You can see a picture in the Philips professional and authoring CD-i players section of the ICDIA site. It was later replaced by the CD-i 605 which was much smaller.

The first consumer player sold was the CD-i 205 (EU) or 910 (US). The same player was sold with different model number on different sides of the Atlantic.

Also check out History of the Philips CD-i on the PhilipsCDi site.

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Post by Erronous » Fri Mar 17, 2006 11:43 pm

cdifan wrote:The CD-i 180 was the first player, but it was only used for development and never sold on the consumer market. It consisted of three stacked boxes and was quite bulky.
So far al the CD-i 180 players I've owned and seen (IRL and on auction sites), except one, only had two stackable modules. This configuration was appearantly was used in (Hasselt?!?) as CD-i to verify that titles would run without problems on a CD-i player. So there are quite a few around of those, also weird that most are 110V models. 220V players are much rarer, at least around here.

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Post by Devin » Sat Mar 18, 2006 10:36 am

Maybe something to do with the Kyocera connection? With Japan rated at 110v power supply and all.
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Post by cdifan » Sat Mar 18, 2006 10:55 am

The 180 was also sometimes called the "JNMS" player, which I seem to remember has some connection with Kyocera. Can't recall any details, though...

The unit that could be left out for testing was the CDI-182 CD-i Expansion module with floppy drives, extra RAM, etc. More details about the CD-i 180 modules can be found here (ICDIA).

In theory, you could also leave out the CDI-180 CD-i player module when using an emulator for development (see the link above for info about the E1 and E2 emulator models); note that this is an entirely different type of emulation compared to my CD-i Emulator program!

Some more info from an actual owner of this machine can be found here (FreetimeWeb).

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Post by rst » Sat Mar 18, 2006 4:27 pm

Ok cdifan, good infor :)

But about number of colors.... <-- ;)
Exist games for cd-i with the maximun number of colors ? 430080
or only games with 256 colors ? Of course i know the real images in some games it has 24 bits color. But the games are the answer i am finding.

Regards ... RST

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Post by Erronous » Sat Mar 18, 2006 5:16 pm

What a coincidense, I just bought a complete CD-i 180 with three modules today, also 220V :). So if anyone wants to buy a two-stack 180, please let me know.

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Post by WindowsKiller » Mon Mar 27, 2006 3:25 pm

Erronous wrote:So if anyone wants to buy a two-stack 180, please let me know.
Where are you from?

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