When we talk about CD-i, most of us automatically think of Philips, the Dutch electronics company who actively pushed CD-i on the market. The CD-i format however was originally developed together with Sony and Matsushita (Pioneer, Fujitsu, Sanyo). We know that Sony released the portable IVO-10 (In Japan) and the IVO-11 (In USA) CD-i viewers. These did not have any Digital Video capabilities. In the past year we've found a few more Sony CD-i players that never passed the prototype stage, like the IVO-12 and another unknown CD-i portable player by Sony. This time, another CD-i project by Sony came to our attention. Apparently, Sony seems to have released a third CD-i player that slipped through the attention of the CD-i community.
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This is the Sony IVO-N7 CD-i player. It seems like Sony pulled the same trick that LG did with the Goldstar GPI1100 and the GPI1200 portable CD-i players and what Philips did with the CD-i 310 and the CD-i 350/360: Sony released an unaltered portable CD-i player without the LCD screen. The Sony IVO-N7 is exactly the same unit as the IVO-10, but now without the LCD screen. We can verify this as the service manual of the Sony IVO-N7 recently popped up. The CD-i unit was recently even auctioned on the Japanese Yahoo website, which proofs it actually exists. These service manuals are very helpful: They helped the author of CD-i Emulator, cdifan, to finally extract the ROM of the Sony CD-i portables to increase compatibility of the CD-i Emulator.
The model IVO-N7 is equivalent to the previous model IVO-V11 (Japanese Model is V10), but the LCD block, terminal input function and built-in speaker are deleted and the communication port RS232C (2CH) is added in the IVO-N7.
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According to our sources Sony was actually working on seven (7!) multimedia projects at the time (cross platform including CD-i, MultiMedia CD (MMCD), Data Discman / Electronic Book, News Station, Bamboo, MD Data (MiniDisc) and even a start on the Playstation platform), which means possibly we haven't traced back all CD-i players by Sony yet! The IVO-N7 was released in September 1993, but it was still lacking Digital Video options. The year 1993 is of course interesting, as we always believed that the IVO-10 and IVO-11 were released in 1991 and that Sony stopped CD-i development quickly after that. The first Sony CD-i players were shown in 1990 at an exhibition in Osaka, used for visitor information. In October 1992, the IVO-10 was presented on a Japanese Fair, which also seems to be pretty late in the CD-i timeline.
Below you see the IVO-10; the IVO-N7 used the same design but lacks the top screen.
[Thanks, Jorg Kennis, cdifan]
