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The Philips CD-i 370 portable player was the final (and ultimate?) Philips portable CD-i player, in itself a licensed version of the Goldstar GPI-1200M portable CD-i player



I love the pictures shared by CD-i member Leon Kiriliuk about his CD-i 370 portable player. After the original CD-i 310, 350 and 360 portable CD-i players made by Philips itself, they also licensed the 1995 GPI-1200M portable CD-i player built by LG and put it on the market under the Philips umbrella. It was far more portable compared to these earlier CD-i models. "These were made by (Lucky) GoldStar and used a very compact design, known as the "68341 integrated CD-i engine" or just "portable". The GPI 1200 is the same player and also the bigger LG and DVS players are very similar." - Retrostuff posted on Twitter. It found a useful niche as a training and presentation tool, which was precisely the application Philips targeted with their CDi-370 laptop player. The original Goldstar version was introduced in 1995, a bit late in the CD-i life cycle. It has all of the facilities of it’s grown-up cousins, including full-motion video playback, CD quality audio plus a set of interactive controls. Of course notably it features the D-pad on the right side and the action buttons on the left side, which looks like inconvenient as it is the opposite of the regular gamepad controls we are used to. In fact, the Sony CD-i portable systems have the same button lay-out. I like the stereo speakers on the front panel!


One of the key features of course is the fact it has a replaceable battery instead of the built-in Timekeeper chip:



Also nice is the PAL/NTSC switch on the side. In principle, CD-i was region free.



[Thanks, Leon Kiriliuk]



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