Articles related to CD-i development

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cdoty
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Articles related to CD-i development

Post by cdoty » Thu Aug 16, 2007 4:07 am

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.
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K1ngArth3r
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Post by K1ngArth3r » Wed Jan 21, 2009 6:10 pm

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?

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Post by cdoty » Wed Jan 28, 2009 4:34 am

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 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.

I did use a few different player for speed comparisons. This is the only real need for hardware.
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Post by K1ngArth3r » Wed Jan 28, 2009 4:52 am

Excellent, thanks for the response.

If you ever wanted to sell the 605 unit please let me know, I don't plan on using one if I can help it but would be nice to own.

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Post by Bas » Wed Jan 28, 2009 1:15 pm

Hey, you should hunt down one of these! I would love to learn more about these cards to run CD-i on a pc.

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Post by K1ngArth3r » Wed Jan 28, 2009 5:16 pm

Thats a nice piece of hardware.

So looks like there are 2 versions ISA and PCI.

Does anybody own one of these or not which country they were released in?

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Post by Erronous » Wed Jan 28, 2009 9:09 pm

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.

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Post by K1ngArth3r » Wed Jan 28, 2009 9:13 pm

So i'm guessing

Windows 95 for the ISA card
Windows 98 for the PCI card

Do you own one then?

If so which one do you own?

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Post by Erronous » Wed Jan 28, 2009 9:21 pm

I have a PCI I2M card. I've never seen the ISA card, but I've had 3 PCI cards so I would think the ISA card would be much rarer. Also probably impossible to find software for that.

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Post by K1ngArth3r » Wed Jan 28, 2009 9:23 pm

Do you know how much the PCI I2M card generally sells for?

Do you have a spare? :wink:

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I2M PCI cards

Post by sfetchit » Mon Dec 07, 2009 3:17 am

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.

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Post by cdifan » Mon Dec 07, 2009 11:23 am

There is I2M software on ICDIA, several versions actually. I don't know for which card versions it is, though.

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I2M cards

Post by sfetchit » Mon Dec 07, 2009 1:20 pm

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... :-)

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Post by cdifan » Mon Dec 07, 2009 4:25 pm

Yes, I had noticed that and development CD-i Emulator already has a "host" device emulator for the exact purpose. Can't remember its current status, but it certainly isn't playing discs :P

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