It is October 2020 and you haven't heard a lot from us about the development of CD-i Emulator. Recently our inbox received some emails about what is the current state of CD-i Emulator and will there be an update soon? On the (one and only) official website www.cdiemu.org there is no update since 2018 and even the newest 0.5.3 beta version is not available to download, but that doesn't mean the project has stopped. On the contrary, recent developments are promising to increase the compatibility of CD-i emulation. For example, thanks to the discovery of the Sony CD-i service manuals, CD-i Emulator author cdifan has succeeded in retrieving the ROM out of our Sony CD-i player by "preparing a conversion print from TTL to RS232 for the on-board service port in order read out the ROM using the built-in diagnostics tool documented in the service manual.
Download speed using this tool is about 30 bytes per second, so it goes extremely slow. According to the service manual the ROM contains 835kb of data while most Philips player ROMs were only 512kb. What else could be in it?", according to cdifan. Cdifan also succeeded in taking the ROM of his Kyocera pro 1000S after creating a converter from 'MiniDin A' (normal CD-i players) to '8-pin MiniDin B'. Cdifan: "The Kyocera player does not natively work with the Philips 'stub' protocol but it supports the CD-i Stub disc just fine.
In this way we can take away the final red bars in the compatibility list of player roms in CD-i Emulator; this has already uncovered at least one 68000 bug. Until now it is difficult to find comparable hardware between the Philips/Kyocera/Sony CD-i players, it would be interesting to build a family tree of differences and similarities in the designs by the different CD-i manufacturers. About the supported chips in CD-i Emulator, there is the 68070 (Philips), 68341 and 68000."
That leaves us with high interest in the I2M cards, which we haven't found yet. What were these based on? Even when we find one, it will be difficult to connect it and get it working (you'll need 'old equipment' with an ISA bus to start with; something we luckily have in the Home Computer Museum!). "At least the I2M cards did not contain a ROM as the software was downloaded from the PC. The drivers that are part of this can still be downloaded from ICDIA (so in fact there are some ROM files on ICDIA for years already!). In CD-i Emulator, the I2M card ROM is already halfway in booting.", cdifan explains.
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The contents of the Sony CD-i ROM |
"The Sony CD-i ROM shows this is another new implementation of the CD/AP functionality. So next to the CDIC, DSP, CIAP by Philips, we have RCHIP by Goldstar a different Kyocera one and now a different Sony one." In the end, development of CD-i Emulator goes steady and it is certainly in the details to increase the compatibility step by step. But CD-i Emulator is actively being developed and we still expect to see some updates before the official 30th birthday of CD-i, October 15, 2021.
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The Kyocera Pro 1000S CD-i ROM will soon be compatible with CD-i Emulator |
Also keep an eye on the official CD-i Emulator blog here, which will be updated one of these days with more on the current developments.
[Thanks, cdifan, Jorg Kennis]