Last year we showed you the PCMCIA CD-player by Panasonic. It remained unreleased but it promised  CD-i and Video-CD support by using a CD-i hardware card. Jorg kennis made an important statement about this CD-i function: "About this player: "Interesting. But I assume this is just a "regular" CD-ROM player (albeit with a PCMCIA connector to connect it to a laptop in an era that USB was not yet standard), and that it does not have CD-i specific features, just "hardware" capable of reading CD-i discs (like most CD-ROM drives)". Today a similar product, which was actually released, was showed to us by CD-i member Andy AVAV Systems. Andy: "This player works as CD Audio Walkman or with PCMCIA SCSI Card for Photo CD, CD-Extra CD-XA CD-Rom etc. I’m told with right software it does CD-i too, but no proof of that so far". 

I remembered the Panasonic player and with the right card it could be connected to a PC, it would not be able to play CD-i by itself. In that case the discman functions purely as a reader, not as a player of, for example, the CD-i format. The discman works with an enhanced card to extend compatibility via a PC (not just CD-i Ready). With the PCMCIA SCSI Card, you could connect the unit to a PC? In that case the only functional part is the reader inside. It's too small to hold the hardware by itself. Sony worked on a variety of formats! If I go through the manual, Photo CD support here means you can view the pictures through Quicktime on PC, reading from this reader. A PC is needed to connect. I don't see it supports the photo cd application. 

Still, this kind of CD-i support (including Photo CD and Video-CD) was a great attempt to combine (and let survive) the interactive format (this Sony pleayer was released in 1996), trying to solve the war with the CD-ROM format.

[Thanks, Andy AVAV Systems]