A rare piece of CD-i history: This BO console was prototype hardware for testing the graphical capabilities of the hardware that would eventually be used in the CD-i

In August 2019, over a year back, we showed a unique CD-i related prototype: The BO Console, some kind of video synthesizer developed by Philips Research to test the graphical capabilities of the CD-i. According to the original seller, only two units were made. The unit was for sale but it took a long time before it was sold. Now the new owner, CD-i member Jorne/MrMii6 shared more pictures in our Community group and he is compiling all the info he can gather about this prototype. This is a new chance to discover more about this BO console. I was always wondering what it exactly was, as the info told us it is some kind of experimental video synthesizer. My conclusion is that it is not a full CD-i player itself, and that it was at a point made compatible with CD-i, but that developments started separate. 

But I'm not sure, it's a grey area! CD-i member Michiel Roos about this: "It looks like a complete CD-i player to me, the floppy is dated 1989 which is after the release of the first authoring players so I guess it has to do with digital video development? Maybe a video board where they did everything in seperate logic before they made custom silicon. The easiest way is just to take some pictures of the seperate boards so you can identify the chips. Especially the leftmost board which would be the compute board. it looks like it has a hard drive, you can load software from there instead of CD."

Jorne: "A Philips CD-i prototype and devkit I found for sale locally. I want to share this story with you all as well as gather as much information as I possibly can. Long story short: after thinking about it for a long while, I decided to just bite the bullet and buy it. Before buying I did some more research and it turned out that this prototype was previously put up for auction on Catawiki. At that time, an article was also written on a Dutch CD-i blog, Interactive Dreams. I contacted the seller and it turned out he was the same guy who put it up for auction two years prior. The sale did not end up happening due to a dissagreement between the seller and the winner of the auction. I asked him about the origin of the machine. He told me it belonged to his father who worked for the CD-i division of Philips Belgium. According to him, only two of these units have ever been made with this one being the only one to ever surface."

"So what am I going to do now? The first step is to gather information. After that I'm going to attempt to get the unit to function. I want to document everything I can about it and share it with the world. I'm not sure what I'll do with it after all of that but I'm considering donating it to a videogame museum here in Europe. If anyone has any information about this, or knows anyone else who could have info on this. Please let me know. Any help with this is greatly appreciated. What I can say about with the info I have so far is that this unit was not really meant for testing CD's or developing software. It was meant as prototype hardware for testing the graphical capabilities of the hardware that would eventually be used in the CD-i. It has a 10mb SCSI hdd and runs on an old unix based OS called OS9.", Jorne explains.

CD-i member JP Atkinson offers valuable details, as he worked at Philips Research on this prototype himself: "Nice reminder of my days at Philips Research Labs with those VME racks! I still have a sample of the Video Systems Controller somewhere. VME is the 68000 backplane bus in the rack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMEbus. This a picture of the VSC though I have an earlier prototype sample (7.1):

More when it develops!

[Thanks, Jorne, JP Atkinson, Michiel Roos and the community at Reddit and Discord]