french driving test on CD-i

Shroo-man · Post by **Shroo-man** » Mon Feb 02, 2009 11:10 pm

I found a seller who was selling a bunch of proffesional discs on eBay fr. They are driving theory tests, two types one was called "Ecol-Auto" the other "Codes Rousseau". The latter one is the interesting one as it was made in 1999.

I only got my hands on two discs, one Codes Rousseau (number 7) and one Ecol-Auto (number 3). The seller was auctioning off about a dozen and I only 1 euro on each and left it. I though noone else would find them so I was outbid on all except 2. Here are some screenshots

Notice the picture of a custom-made CD-i controller with a digital display and buttons - Confirm, Cancel, A, B, C and D. This would of been used by the student to select the answer to the questions. The test requires the student to answer around 40 questions about driving rules in real situations illustrated with in-car photographs. Some of the photos have animation for example an indicator blinking therefore they can keep the questions short as they don't have to explain where the car is indicating.

At the end it tallies up the participants score and tells them what questions they got right and wrong in each category. Since there are 7 different tests on differents discs and it takes a while to finish one, I assume the student would sit through one theory test before having a driving lesson.

Post by **Bas** » Wed Feb 04, 2009 7:49 am

You know there are even more professional CD-i titles (like this one) than consumer titles? I know that in The Netherlands for a time they also had these driving tests based on a CD-i system.

In this topic Calypso comes up with it. This was especially interesting because it had a bar code scanner attached to the CD-i player.

Great pics, Shroo-man, can you make those by yourself?

Shroo-man · Post by **Shroo-man** » Wed Feb 04, 2009 9:27 am

Yeah I though that too, in fact the ICDIA has a list of all the companies which had custom CD-i discs made for them. But they are much harder to find because of small print runs since these discs weren't targeted at the mass market.

Interesting thread that one especially with the inclusion of the barcode scanner. You could probably program software to use just about any RS232 device its strange that you don't see more auctions like that. Once I saw an auction for a CD-i used for dental imaging.

At the moment I've got someone elses computer which has the capture card. So yes I can do it myself but not with my computer - although I'm seriously considering buying my own because they are so useful.

The software it uses is not the best though - you have to use small little window to play the game and It can't split video files in portions over 9 mins.

That is the main reason why I haven't yet uploaded more Sharaku footage. I have a 35 minute WMV file but need to find a decent splitter or I need to record it again stopping it manually. Recording it again is a pain but finding a freeware splitter seems to be impossible. I'll probably just rerecord soon

j_eits · Post by **j_eits** » Mon Feb 09, 2009 11:47 pm

I was searching for CD-i stuff on ebay today and found this auctions:
http://cgi.ebay.de/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vie ... :IT&ih=007
http://cgi.ebay.de/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vie ... :IT&ih=007
http://cgi.ebay.de/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vie ... :IT&ih=007

The most interesting thing is, that there is a CD-i version of this software from 2007. I've searched for the publisher and found the webpage: http://www.fahren-lernen.de/ Can't find a CD-i version there. Maybe they've stopped suporting CD-i now...

Shroo-man · Post by **Shroo-man** » Tue Feb 10, 2009 3:58 am

nice find. and its very interesting that some european countries were still using CD-i for vehicle license tests less than 2 years ago! its unbeleivable.

cdifan · Post by **cdifan** » Thu Feb 12, 2009 9:55 pm

There are still one or two driving schools in The Netherlands using CD-i driving test software published in 2000 or so...