CD-i member Paul Clarke is the original developer of the Non-Intrusive Realtime Debugger unit for the CD-i. It helped CD-i developers to find bugs in their CD-i software. Thanks to the NIRD, CD-i was able to receive ports of Atlantis: The Last Resort, RAM Raid and other games like Pac-Panic and Creature Shock. It might well be that without the NIRD these games would not be possible on CD-i. Paul also created a manual for it, but unfortunately the accompanying software tools are missing nowadays. The manual however is now available on ICDIA. Paul: "I hope you enjoy it. Took me ages to upscale as it was a weird size close to A5 but not quite. I wrote it in Lex as word processors didn't really exist then, and Philips used Lex - yuk! Writing that was harder than developing the product itself. There's some interesting reference stuff at the back including some assembler and instruction code for 6807. Sadly I don't have the PC software any more, nor the debugging CD-i disc with the app that is described in the manual."
Find the manual here: http://www.icdia.co.uk/authoring/nirdv10ug.pdf
Paul also shared more pictures of the NIRD which we will preserve too in a nice article, combining with instruction by Paul himself. The NIRD was saved in a travel case so Paul could travel to various CD-i developers with it:
Taking it our of the case, here we can have a close look at both sides of the PCB layout:
On location, the NIRD could be inserted in the universal DVC slot of every CD-i player, which by itself could be connected to the terminal and PC.
More to come when it develops!
[Thanks, Paul Clarke and cdifan]