"I worked in the Home Interactive Systems group at Philips Research Redhill for 7 years. The first 4 was on CD-i. To break me in as a grad I wrote a GUI for CD-i devs to archive stuff (essentially a GUI for TAR). Then my boss asked me if I also did hardware, and I said yes, and that led to me developing the hardware and software for the Non-Intrusive Real-time Debugger which I then used with loads of games developers in UK, Europe and US to get their games out. In lunch breaks I used the NIRD to optimise graphics routines to get to the point where I could write RamRaid and Atlantis. After that I moved into other areas of research around advanced STBs using the Philips TriMedia processor.
In terms of the wider department we had lots of CD-i R&D going on. One guy wrote a game that allowed you to splice MPEG videos to make music videos (I can not listen to Fields of Gold to this day without cringing as it was playing all day). My boss ported the very first public Java release to CD-i to investigate that. We also encoded a lot of the original Video CD's and CD-i video titles at an advanced (for its time) rate of 1 video frame every 2 seconds! We were up all night trying to optimise the Hunt for Red October for example with all it's underwater shots. The funniest video to encode was fo the Joy of Sex title as Epic Multimedia (I think) shot the video but when we looked at it they had patterned wallpaper and duvets which "stole" all of the bits so they had to go and reshoot lol. And of course we had the gurus who were part of the MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MHEG, DVB and other specs - really clever boffin types"
[Thanks, Paul Clarke]