In the past we have made some articles about the NIRD cartridge: The Non-Intrusive Real-time Debugger. It was a system created by Paul Clarke, a Research Scientist at Philips Research at the time of CD-i. In principle it was a debugger cartridge that could be inserted in the slot of the Digital Video Cartridge. The DVC slot was a universal expansion slot, not just an expansion for digital video. In the end Philips only used it for the Digital Video Cartridge, but Philips experimented with other cartidges including the Game cartridge, offering more memory and, for example, sprite techniques. One other use of the slot was for debugging. CD-i was difficult to develop software for and in the end there were numerous projects that never saw the light of day, while they often had prototypes pressed that seemed like 100% complete. As Philips had so many different CD-i player types, it often happened that a title played perfectly on one type, but crashed on a specific model. Sometimes the bugs were so well hidden that it was very difficult to get them out. The NIRD was perfect for tracing this. The NIRD made it possible that CD-i had games like Atlantis: The Last Resort and RAM Raid.
Paul Clarke shared more pictures of the NIRD which he still owns. We will archive and preserve the material on ICDIA and other CD-i collections to keep it safe for the future. He will also share more insights on the background, how it worked and what it could do.
Paul Clarke met the Philips Research team in the summer on 1987 when Philips sponsored a science summer camp for colleges at Surrey University as part of the Crest (Creativity in Science and Technology) Award scheme.
He worked forthem for 4 summers while at the University of Southampton doing a masters degree in computer science, and they sponsored him too. After graduating Paul joined Philips Research Labs in Redhill as a research Scientist in the Home Interactive Systems Research Group.
While at Philips Paul developed the Non-Intrusive Realtime Debugger (NIRD) and worked with software publishers in the US and across the UK and Europe to help get their CD-I titles developed faster.25units werealsomade and sold by Philips to development houses.
Using the NIRD Paul optimised a raycasting enginein his lunch breaksto the point where a playable demo of a “3D” first person shooting demo using Doom graphics was possible. Philips Media then commissioned him and the labs together with the gaming team at nearby Philips Advanced Development & Support to develop Atlantis: The Last Resort. Development of this game was briefly interrupted to create an online version called RamRaid to help launch the CD-Online “net on your [TV] set” proposition. Approx 40k copies of Atlantis eventually sold. Paul left Philips in 1999 moving onto a career at Cap Gemini, then HP Services Consulting & Integration, and then Sky where he works today.
More to come on the NIRD!
[Many thanks to Paul Clarke for sharing the pictures and the insights and background of the NIRD]