The History of the Philips CD-I, Failed PlayStation Ancestor | Hacker News Reader

The History of the Philips CD-I, Failed PlayStation Ancestor

atlasobscura.com

140 pointstosh109 comments

I was one of the lead developers at Philips Interactive Media. To be fair, where the article focuses on video games, the CD-I player was never intended to be a game machine. At the time, Philips was betting that encyclopedias, educational and subscription publications would be on discs. They were betting that the network speed and general public adoption of the Internet was going to be slower, with a disc based interactive media period. They underestimated the advance of network speeds as well as the public's willingness to wait for the network. A lot of the CD-I development was centered around the consumer / end-user never having to wait, which was accomplished through a special real time media file format that effectively turned the disc into a single 740 MB file.

It was not until the reality of CD-I players being sold that the necessity for games and the zero interest in educational media became clear. At the time, digital media itself was new, and the idea of a dedicated digital disc based encyclopedia / magazine made sense.

In many ways, the focus on educational markets and rich magazine content made sense: presumably the revenue model would be based on licensing per volume, and a subscription publication guarantees an ongoing flow of new copies to be sold.

This was also an established industry as opposed to video gaming, which was either nascent and amateur, or tightly controlled by established players making arcade cabinets and home consoles.

Was there a sense that you're abusing the spirit of the CD with the Green Book (the CD-i spec)?

The Green Book was just another standard, dictating the tolerances a CD player had to operate within in order to certify as being CD-I player capable. Where the Red Book dictated how data on disc in sectors had to be organized and played back, the Green Book did the same for interleaved files and real time media. There was no concept of "abuse", just different standards for different purposes. Any CD-I player was a CD-ROM player, but only Green Book complaint hardware could be called a CD-I player.

I also remember the day Microsoft made Internet Explorer free - it was the first time a major piece of software was simply "free" - speculation among CD & subscription based media proponents was that was Bill Gates trying to kill CD based business models.

That is a really fascinating comment - essentially the advent of gaming on the platform was a reposition after the market it was built for failed.

I'd love to hear more about how Philips managed to get Nintendo over a barrel on use of their characters though - Nintendo is one of the tightest creative IP holders in the world at this point, maybe their experience with Philips pushed them towards that?

Back then the big consumer players were Nintendo, Sony and Philips. The PlayStation was actually the second PlayStation, with a deal between Philips and Sony to jointly produce it blown by Nintendo. The result of which being Philips able to use Nintendo licenses in limited ways, and Sony hating Philips.

I'm 100% sure Nintendo became Disney-esque right after the Super Mario Bros movie came out. They were completely embarrassed publicly for that. Before that they were just greedy cartridge licensers.

This takes me back, and points out something people today probably don't fully appreciate.

In 1993, Edutainment was the promise of computers. We had an old XT that my sister took to college that fall, and we were shopping for a 486. Encarta and National Geographic CD-ROM based titles were everywhere. Every demo in every computer store let you play with these seemingly-limitless repositories of information. It was mind-blowing -- complete with short postage stamp videos for select subjects!

It would be fascinating to look back at all of the titles available, but rich multimedia was finally here, and it died as quickly as it had arrived, as people moved to AOL, CompuServe, and the Internet instead.

I sunk a ton of time into Encarta as a kid. In some ways, it still seems superior to Wikipedia.

I remember replaying that cheetah video, Neil Armstrong’s “one small step...” and that gravity interactive countless times

I think these may be the two videos you are referring to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEH-HxLJtBM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4t2g37DAcQ

Basketball too :)

Mindmaze. That's all I have to say.

Is there anything like that today?

Not that I know of.

The demise of CD-ROM as a format and later the .com bust probably had a fair bit to do with the education software market getting reshaped in weird ways. I was a freshman in HS in '01 so at that point I was far enough away from that kind of stuff that I never really found out how it ended up.

Similar story for me. My school didn't have anything like a geography class, but my wandering around Encarta 95 was probably a suitable replacement.

I spent so many hours on that. I remember a later version of Encarta absolutely nerfing it though, and I have no idea why.

Microsoft's CD-based movie encyclopedia product, Cinemania (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Cinemania), was similarly excellent. In terms of presentation, Cinemania 97 was far superior to IMDB as it is 20 years later.

Seeing Alec Guinness (as Ben Kenobi) get cut down by David Prowse in a little 320x240 window :)

Man, those were the days...

I completely forgot about that, you brought some great memories! It really seems like those curated educational/reference/edutainment(?) products were, in some ways, better than interwebz we have today. Microsoft was really good at that game. Even on the internet. I wonder what they're up to now, will have to check out. There was this site they did, I think as a part of demonstration of terraserver, where they made an online sky map with deep zoom functionality. It was impressive at the time. Googling turns out nothing - maybe I should try with Bing.

However, english wikipedia is probably one of the most important, if not THE most important invention internet has brought us. Such a wealth of information and all as a free access. I've dreamt of such thing in our future back then, and now we have it.

Just seeing the word 'Encarta' which I probably haven't thought about or encountered in the past decade is just bringing back a flood of nostalgia.

Encarta, Carmen Sandiego, Kids Typing, and Gizmos & Gadgets. It was the perfect confluence of events - I spent hours of time on these and might have actually learned something.

Slightly related, in Junior High, most boys in my class knew absolute zero − 273.15 figure by heart as if we discovered it and we got it from Saint Seiya. Used well you can convey extremely strong knowledge to young kids.

The Carmen Sandiego game taught me terrible puns!

The first time I ever saw the Hidebburg footage was from a postage stamp sized video on a CD encyclopedia (not Encarta) that came with our CD drive.

Same here. For my family it was the copy of Grolier's Multimedia Encyclopedia that came bundled with our Mac Performa.

Edutainment was always a critical part of the sales pitch from children to their parents trying to get a computer to play games on.

Only Microsoft product I bought from a shelf was Encarta 97. It was ok, but the main thing I remember from that is 1) some beatles thumbnails videos 2) macromedia flash based

Multimedia - now there's a word I haven't heard in so long :)

The CD-I (along with WebTV and some other things) was the initial step of the TV morphing into some sort of Information Superhighway appliance. MSNBC was a partnership of Microsoft and NBC that was created in anticipation of this as well. But the TV/PC hybrid never happened. (Today's Apple TV, XBox, etc really aren't what people had in mind.)

TiVo was really the first product that came close to fulfilling the dream of “asynchronous TV”, which is now fully realized thanks to streaming.

Anyone else remember reading that chapter in Bill Gates’ book “The Road Ahead” back in the ‘90s?

It sort of happened, just 20 years later, and the details are different. The web's user experience proved to be superior to that of physical media you had to switch out, but Internet speeds had to get fast enough (and the usage billed in a lenient way) for rich multimedia to be delivered smoothly.

In the meantime, the TV screen lost relevance to first desktop computers, then laptop computers, then smartphones. Microsoft was the only large company who consistently hammered on this idea (Encarta, DHTML, MSN, HD-DVD's HDi, Xbox 360's dashboard), and with a vested interest in the health of the desktop ecosystem, but they couldn't execute this first convergence -- and ironically, neither the second convergence of desktops and smartphones. Apple and Google leapfrogged them in critical ways, and this interactive consumption revolution took place on the latter two's portable smartphones instead.

It definitely happened, but in a much different way: mostly over the internet/www and on computers and phones.

The vision in the early-mid 90s was for something like MSNBC to be an interactive TV channel, delivered by the TV/cable provider, where you could chat/vote/etc through the TV and customize your experience.

That sounds similar to what we have now (with their cable channel, accompanying website, app, Twitter, etc) but the technical details and delivery mechanisms ended up being totally different.

> That sounds similar to what we have now (with their cable channel, accompanying website, app, Twitter, etc) but the technical details and delivery mechanisms ended up being totally different.

I think the really key thing here is that general-purpose computing won over purpose-built devices. Yeah, an mid-90s embedded system probably had a better UI in many ways than even a 2018 browser-based system, but that embedded system could only do one thing well while the browser system can do many, many things — and some of them quite well indeed!

Moreover, it turns out that all those industry committees couldn't accurately predict the future. Neither could the free Web folks (anyone remember the Semantic Web?) — but because the free folks let anyone do anything, they let the winners do their thing. Meanwhile, the centralised industry committees didn't allow experimentation — or when they did, didn't allow enough. C.f. OSI vs TCP/IP, X.400 vs SMTP &c.

Of course, it also helped the later efforts that the other shoe of CD-ROM and Internet appliance development never really dropped - at least how they were expecting.

It still boggles my mind that basic web skills (HTML, CSS, etc.) didn't proliferate in academic settings, outside of tech curriculum. The death of most of the appliance devices was so fast that people never really tried to learn it.

You aren't going to make everybody a programmer, but the arc of history would have been different if that was the baseline.

There was quite a little ecosystem in that space around 2000. Liberate technologies, OpenTV and Microsoft were all jockeying to fuse the browser and TV. I worked on Liberate's product for a little while which looked a lot like Android. (at least the fire TV version)

Turns out that like CD-i no one cared. Liberate had a blockbuster IPO which fell to earth long before anyone could sell. (I think my boss from that time actually worked on CD-i)

I almost exclusively use my computer to view video content (in my case, mostly streaming sports but some Netflix as well). About 70% of the time, the thing I'm watching can be "cast" via Chromecast onto my TV. So I'd argue that my laptop is indeed the TV/PC hybrid.

I would also argue that the "smart" TVs that have Netflix and Amazon Movies and services like that built in are also candidates for the "TV/PC Hybrid" moniker.

My dad was a marketing exec at Philips back in the ‘90s, so I had a couple of CD-I units at home, and a ton of games. I even had an infrared gun controller and a really, really low-quality VR headset driven by dark little CRTs (I think?). Most of my discs had simple white labels, and I’m pretty sure many of them were never actually released. I wish I still had them.

At the time, my dad had told me the CD-I’s primary market was commercial, e.g., interactive training, demo kiosks, media stations in libraries, etc. I don’t know whether that was the original vision or a pivot based on lousy sales. It was probably a smart move, though, considering the only other person I knew with a CD-I at home was the daughter of the VP overseeing that division.

I used to have a CD-I infomercial on VHS featuring a giant, talking screen called “The Wall”. I wonder if I can track that down on the interwebs.

Fun aside: a CD-I video disc of Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan was my first exposure to Trek. Other fond memories include The Wacky World of Miniature Golf (sooo much fun), Escape from Cyber City, Mad Dog McCree, and Laser Lords (never did make much progress in that game).

After the consumer market failed, it was re-purposed for the industrial media / trainer market. The production system I wrote for Philips to make slide show media was licensed to 3rd party developers, and I remember answering different developer's questions about the development for at least a decade after I left Philips. (I left Philips to be an OS developer for the 3DO, and left them to be an OS developer for the PlayStation. Ah, those were the daze.)

>> I left Philips to be an OS developer for the 3DO, and left them to be an OS developer for the PlayStation. Ah, those were the daze

Third time’s a charm ;-P

As a kid I desperately wanted a CDi, and then an Amiga CD32 and then a 3DO. I never got any of them. Having saved enough to finally buy a 3DO I was derailed at the last minute by my dad who didn't want me spending so much on a games machine. He made a deal that if I didn't buy it he'd splash out for a new PC. That was the PC I learned to code on and the decision that led me to this career, and I'm glad he talked me out of it.

It's so strange to be sharing a chat forum decades later with one of the engineers who built the OS for it. I'm sorry I never got to admire your handiwork, but I'm also not sorry :)

That infomercial made me want a CD-I so bad! https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=9dV9nAx0TOo

I had a summer job at 3T productions in ~1992, who did Cluedo for CD-i; while I spent my time on a CD-XA project on a PC, dev for the CD-i wasn't easy; given video compression was so early, and the video-decompressor module was optional, it was difficult to do any useful video on CD-i, and the specified seek time on the CD was ages. Remember that doing CD dev for anything in 1992 was hard - CD writers were >£10k (and blanks ~£10+ each) with the CD writer connected via phono to a CD-i dev machine wired onto a Sun workstation. And that 600MB+ hard drive you needed to store the image was full-height 5.25" (and I hate to think the cost).

Those old Sun workstations had re-purposed grey-scale newspaper publishing screens. I remember being hooked on having two full newspaper page sized windows side by side for my CD-I development. Not until retina displays did I have that again, and it was very welcome.

So you're the one...

It was such a short period of time, but holy shit was it good. As (I believe) Merlin Mann said on the first episode of Reconcilable Differences, "...and then there's those poor bastards in Tallahassee with all the Phillips CD-i stuff that was popular for a month"

Pour one out for CD-i. Ahead of its time.

> Pour one out for CD-i. Ahead of its time.

As someone whose first job in tech was doing software QA for a publisher of CD-i titles, let me say: no, it really wasn't.

If anything, CD-i was behind its time. As a game console, its poor controls and sluggish responsiveness made it inferior even to consoles like the Genesis and SNES that had come out years earlier; as a means of playing back video, its reliance on a low-resolution SDTV display made it inferior even to a computer with a VGA monitor; as a repository of information, its dependence on optical media made it inferior even to a nascent Web accessed over a 28.8kpbs modem. Even at first release, there was nothing CD-i did that some other product already on the market wasn't doing better.

This wasn't because the engineers at Philips were bad at their jobs; as the parent comment notes, it's more to do with CD-i being a product designed for a market segment that turned out to not really exist. So it ended up getting sold into market segments that did exist, against products that had been designed specifically to satisfy the needs of those segments. And of course those products ran rings around it there.

That comment was more for @bsenftner, tbh. They tried, but it didn't work out. No need to rub salt in the wound just because the format didn't catch on.

Oh, and for the record...SNES > Genesis.

While they are considered to be part of the same 'generation' ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_console#Fourth_gene... ) the Genesis was released two years before the NES, which at that time was around 1/3rd to 1/2 of a console generation.

IMO, where Sega really failed was all of the failed addons. They didn't really have a 'good' console until the Dreamcast, it had many features that were too far ahead of their time, while being crippled by others which were detrimental. Largely using an outdated 'mega CD' like format and lacking support for DVD playback, which the competitor (PS2) ended up having as a major selling point. In some parallel universe where the Dreamcast happened to have DVD playback (as well as games on either CD or DVD depending) and the option of an ethernet or modem addin Sega might still be making consoles.

DVD wouldn't have saved Dreamcast. DVD drives were far too expensive to manufacture at the time. Sony was large enough where they could subsidize the inclusion of a DVD player in PS2, selling the console at a loss. There was no way Sega could do the same; Sony manufactured their DVD drives.

The Dreamcast had a 56k modem built-in, and an Ethernet adapter was sold later on, so I don't know what you're talking about.

And Genesis was a "good" console. It was Sega's only console that was commercially successful.

> As a means of playing back video, its reliance on a low-resolution SDTV display made it inferior even to a computer with a VGA monitor.

No kidding. Its reliance on low-resolution MPEG-1 for video meant VCDs compared poorly even to VHS. I believe the NTSC discs had roughly similar horizontal resolution to VHS, but only about half the vertical resolution. I suppose the quality would be similar in theory, as the VCDs were not interlaced like VHS, but that wasn't my experience.

I had Star Trek II and a couple other movies on CD-I video discs, and my first impression was, "wow, I can barely make out these opening credits."

I do, however, credit my CD-I for giving me early exposure to the VCD format. I had a CD-R back before most people even knew they existed (they were still called WORM drives), and I put together a few school projects on VCD.

In a similar boat; I got a CD-I with the add-on MPEG-1 module (picked up for $20 for a floor-model clearance table in the late-90s), but in my eyes the big failure of VCD as a format was needing two discs per movie.

VCD's aren't that terrible though (a 4head Hifi VCR though would look better), here's a recording of the opening of the Matrix with some trailers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRElGEgHzEE

VCD's never really made it into piracy. If I recall at the time the Warez scene was using Vivo Active [1] (H.263 video and G.723 ADPCM audio) splitting videos at 650Mb, which gave greater fidelity than MPEG-1 in a smaller package. I think that only lasted a year or so until DiVX/Xvid came along.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivo_Software

I can recall a period when pirated MPEG-2 SVCDs could be found easily enough. It was mostly during that period where DVD players were commonplace, but DVD burners were rare. I think some players (Apex?) could even play MPEG-4 video off of CDs, though I don't think that was a standardized format.

Regardless, pirated SVCDs were nowhere near as common as the h.263 discs you mentioned, and you're right about MPEG-1 VCDs. I don't recall seeing (m)any pirated movies in that format.

> a 4head Hifi VCR though would look better

I'm suddenly missing my old Sony SLV-N81 :).

Holy shit, yes. "Multimedia" was to the early 90s what "blockchain" is to today. Even Tandy tried to get in on this act, releasing a CD-ROM "interactive video player" that was actually a 286-based PC running a customized Windows.

Pretty on the nose. Devices that were little more than slide show players like the Kodak Photo CD player were considered "multimedia." Come to think of it, doesn't Kodak have a "blockchain" technology they demoed recently?

also, hello n-g.

Who is n-g?

That would violate the Prime Directive.

I'm not affiliated with them.

I developed one title for CDi while working at a media/marketing company in the early 90's. We had goals of putting the CDi machine in a kiosk with a touch-screen so customers could learn about products without a salesperson hassling them. I carried my "Green Book" around for many years afterwards but never did further CDi development.

At the time Philips started working on CD-I the internet hardly existed in Europe. When I was working on the UK titles back in 1990-2 the Internet really wasn't on people's radar. Only as 1992 turned into 1993 did anyone think the AOL's and Compuserve's as this world would get anywhere.

Equally you miss out the biggest issue with most developments with CD-I the available disk speed and memory (even ignoring seek times) made most developments an interest combination of careful design and often luck. Watching that Mario interstitial with moving eyebrows I'm imaging the disk spinning desperately trying to load the next scene into memory. As an example I remember spending a week trying to work out how to minimise a MPEG video (quarter screen max) in such a way that we could run a seek and load up the background image ready for the next scene.

Was this basically the Enterprise Version of "el paquete?" (The Cuban sneakernet)

I have a first-edition copy of "Compact Disc-Interactive: A Designer's Overview" as a result of a job interview in 1988 that didn't pan out. Looking through it now, one interesting tidbit is that the embedded "CD-RTOS" operating system was based on OS-9 for the 68000.

They also wanted to introduce a new buzzword: "hyper-media" (the hyphen is theirs, not mine). Choice quote: "The concept of hyper-media could have been invented to describe CD-I. Its origins lie in the notion of hyper-text, a term coined by computer guru Ted Nelson in 1965 as a method of linking related bodies of information to allow the user to browse through different databases randomly."

Don't suppose you happen to have any old documentation lying around? Long shot I know but... nostalgia

github.com/mamedev/mame/issues/3599#issuecomment-391492737

Around the same time there was another experiment, from Commodore instead, that didn't turn up that well either, the CDTV:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_CDTV

I remember seeing that in a store or two back in the days.

Commodore also had the Amiga CD32 a few years later. I got my hands on a few CD32 games in a haul of amiga stuff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_CD32

Commodore tried doing "consoles" based on their computers over and over.

The CD32 was a successor of sorts of the CDTV[1], which was based on the Amiga 500 (where CD32 was pretty much - with some minor other changes - an Amiga 1200 equivalent).

But Commodore had also previously tried to launch the cartridge based Commodore MAX Machine[2] (Ultimax, VC-10) and the C64GS [3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_CDTV

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_MAX_Machine

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64_Games_System

It made sense, given that Atari was doing the same a few years prior.

Around the same time was the 3DO spec. It was another attempt at owning the space beneath the TV set.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/3DO_Interactive_Multiplayer

Few quite understood it was also a full-blown Amiga in there but with looks making it living room friendly - intended to match up with typical hifi or VCR.

It actually had some niche success hidden in early multimedia kiosks and info systems for shops and museums.

Kind of a weird title. The SNES CD was the Playstation ancestor. The CD-i was a device made independently that Nintendo partnered with after they dumped Sony.

Spurned by Nintendo, Sony took their SNES CD tech and created the Playstation from it.

I assume they meant it as ‘the first CD console, like the PlayStation was’.

I agree though, it’s misleading.

It only beat Sega CD to the market by less than two weeks. Which, to be fair, wasn't a standalone console, it needed to attach to a Genesis, however they did sell combined (CD plus Genesis) consoles.

The CDX. A great little console. Even worked fine with the 32X despite Sega’s claims to the contrary.

Even if it looked crazy in that configuration.

Nintendo did more than just dump Sony, they humiliated them.

Originally, Sony was supposed to be Nintendo's partner for the CD-i machine. Nintendo went behind Sony's back and partnered with Phillips.

At the summer 1991 CES when Sony was expecting the CD-i machine and their partnership with Nintendo to be announced, Nintendo announced the product with Phillips as their partner.

I can't help but wonder how much animosity towards Nintendo contributed towards the development of the Playstation 1.

Supposedly that partnership lead to the only time, until recently, where Nintendo characters appeared outside of a Nintendo system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-i_games_from_The_Legend_of_...

there were a few exceptions in the early days when they first had their own consoles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Bros.#Ports

and of course before they had consoles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donkey_Kong_(video_game)#Licen...

I remember thinking at the time that the PS1 controller was just like a Snes controller with extended hand grips. They just changed the out the colours / letters for shapes.

From the books I’ve read that humiliation is WHY Sony was willing to green light the PlayStation and get into games.

They created the enemy that dethroned them.

Well... PlayStation has CD-XA, which is kind of the other leg of the Sony/Philips/Nintendo triangle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-ROM#XA

"It was intended as a bridge between CD-ROM and CD-i (Green Book) and was published by Sony and Philips in 1991."

We still have an operational CD-i in my parent's house. We played the heck out of it back in the day. We did own Link: The Faces of Evil, but it was insanely difficult as a kid. Even recently when I've popped it in, the controls are just terrible. A few of the games we played a lot of were The Wacky World of Miniature Golf (narrated by Eugene Levy), Cartoon Carnival, and Mystic Midway: Rest in Pieces.

We had one of these! I fondly remember playing the CDi port of "Defender of the Crown" and a clever crossword game named "Textiles."

Philips also had the rights to Nintendo's characters for a few games, which led to the strange "Hotel Mario," in which the victory condition was to shut all the doors in a hotel. It's unfortunate that the cutscenes are so cringey - the game itself was enjoyable, and the graphics and soundtrack were charming.

I believe we had some Encyclopedia software, too, but in retrospect the UX of paper was much better than trying to navigate a 90s wikipedia with what amounted to a TV remote.

> I believe we had some Encyclopedia software, too

Was that Compton’s Interactive Encyclopedia by chance? I had that one! Had a nice feature on the Bell X-1, if I recall.

The guy that wrote "Hotel Mario" - not the cut scenes, but the game - was a real guru professional. Watching him code was the first time I ever saw anyone adding up the op-code and memory access times to design their algorithm. Everyone at Philips was quite impressed. At bit later a contractor at a game studio showed Philips an idea called Compiled Sprites that allowed 64+ independent animating entities on screen at once. But that innovation came too late, as the brain drain at Philips was already well underway. CD-I was dying just when a way to make the games they needed appeared, but everyone was already mid-job hop.

Apologies for my ignorance, but I'd like to ask if you (or anyone) could elaborate on that "adding up the op-code and memory access times to design their algorithm" bit. I understand what op-codes are, what memory access times are, and have an algorithm design knowledge expected out of "3.5 years of CS+Math undergraduate education, relevant interview prep, and a year and a half working in the field doing generic web work", but I'm not sure I'm wrapping my head around that part. Do you mean that he used those timings to derive an output value for the cost function for higher-level parts of the algorithms he was using? If you can recall any specifics that aren't a trade secret, I'd love to hear it for the sake of my own learning.

We knew the memory read/write times for the different types of RAM in the system, as well as the machine language op code times for all the operations necessary to copy memory from one type of memory to another, with/without color-keyed transparency. The CD-I system provided triggers for when a given scan line was displayed, so with careful timing one could write code with the knowledge that there is time to perform some ambitious calculation. For example, to just copy a block of memory is one thing, but between different types of memory and the timings are different. Now add in the real world necessity of copy with color-key transparency, meaning you need to look into the memory you want to overwrite to choose if the overwrite is going to happen. That has a whole separate set of timings. Combine that with hybrid logic that figures out where dumb block copies and smarter color-key transparency timings trade off, and you have a process segmentation.

That was a good explanation. Thank you!

The Digital Antiquarian wrote an extensive history of the Philips CD-i https://www.filfre.net/2016/09/a-slow-motion-revolution/

In a nutshell: Philips developed CD-i, but then DVI was invented which solved the problem of decompressing . Philips' attempts to catch up with DVI then caused CD-i to be delayed time and again.

So by the early nineties there was still no practical way to take advantage of the massive storage space offered by compact disks, so Microsoft stepped in and led the effort to standardize CD-ROM and the CD-i was left behind as an odd "what could've been".

I can't say I have much sympathy for Philips after reading about the Baer patent in another article on that blog https://www.filfre.net/2017/01/a-time-of-endings-part-3-medi... . Philips behaved in a way that might be considered patent trolling today because they had a patent on basically "any videogame console" that they used against all the other players, despite not really competing in that market themselves.

I remember once playing the CD-I at CES in 1992 (maybe ‘93), well before the days of E3. This was also the same conference where I saw a preview demo of the Sega CD (in retrospect the demo was a complete hoax).

But, what stuck with me most was the potential capability of CD based game systems to have much more immersive environments. It seemed imminent that we would go from 2D sprite based games to something much more complex, and it was absolutely fascinating at the time.

Why was the Sega CD demo a hoax?

CES demos were often being played off a Laserdisc player hidden under the table.

Another room in this case so we couldn’t hear it.

Could have just been a laser disc replaying rendered footage, or a Sega with a custom made cartridge playing back a demo "video"

Pretty much. Not sure of the format, but it wasn’t done with the Sega CD

Hilarious, thanks for the anecdote! Sounds like typical 90s Sega for sure. For instance, remember the VR headset demo that was nothing but canned promo reel?

That would have been quite the cartridge if it had enough capacity to store an entire demo video. Bet it was laser disc.

They did the demo behind closed doors, and the actual demo itself was not rendered with the Sega CD, though they made it seem that way by placing a CD in the machine and starting it up.

The actual demo was full-motion full-screen video about a time travelling kid from the future going back in time to get a Sega CD because it was so advanced.

It was amusing, but when the device actually hit with much inferior video quality all of us who saw it realized it was fake.

Sad really - I wanted that system to succeed at the time.

CD-I was sadly underpowered; the Signetics 68070 was like a 68000 but slower, because it had one less ALU--if only it had a 68020 at the very least. The article doesn't mention some of the better games (e.g. Burn:Cycle) or interesting experiments (the CD-I version of Todd Rundgren's _No World Order_), though they too were constrained by the hardware.

Semi-related was the Kodak Photo CD which was CD-i compatible:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_CD

I'm a volunteer for Zeldathon (not going to link it, you can google it), and we have multiple players that still play these games, and some that have gotten world records in them. It's wild that A) they've held up this long and B) how popular they are in our little community. I think we had 3 or 4 CD-i's at the last marathon I attended.

If you think about it more than 20% of the Zelda games for set-top consoles came out on CD-I.

In a sense, the introduction of the CD-ROM was the ultimate example of an industry going gaga over some new tech.

Not only did we have the likes of the CD-I, we also had games that tried to make use of full motion video to either replace or supplement computer graphics. The results were more often than not poor.

Christ, I remember this thing.

For whatever reason, there are two games that really stuck with me:

- https://youtu.be/KoCFToFstSY

- https://youtu.be/VM0sBhZbXS0

CD-I was way ahead of its time.

A couple of YouTube videos deep I found Crime Control 2, a live action video game. Before 3D graphics got good, I was sure as a kid they were the future.

The X-Files PC game that came on seven discs, some game I played at Euro Disney where you could take penalties against a goalkeeper.

See also Wondery's Business Wars Nintendo vs Sony podcast series https://wondery.com/shows/business-wars/

I will never miss the opportunity to recommend "Game Over" book here, as I did many times so far. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Over_(book) It reads like a thriller and is a great read for everyone - especially entrepreneurs.

I would strongly recommend AVGN's series on this console- it's an amusing, mostly Legend-Of-Zelda-focused look at what a weird console this was.

Zombie Dinos from Planet Zeltoid, that is all. It's greatness will never be equaled.

Found one of these at Goodwill last month. No way to test if it worked, though. Pass.

There might still be a few of them gathering dust in Goodwill locations around Knoxville. That's where Philips' North America HQ was in the early '90s, and at least two of our CD-I units ended up there.

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