CD-i member Stovent is making progress in developing his open source CD-i Emulator 'CeDImu' and he is hitting undocumented pieces of the CD-i hardware, which helps CD-i member cdifan who started documenting them as determined by his reverse engineering for CD-i Emulator v6.0. It's neat how helping each other works both ways and sharing leads to more CD-i information. Cdifan has now set up his own Github page which includes information of the various CD-i player chips. Cdifan: "CD-i players contain a number of chips for which a complete datasheets or programming information is not publicly available. This presents a problem for authors of CD-i emulators which need to emulate these chips. When available, complete datasheets can usually be found in the ICDIA website in the CD-i Technical Documentation / System section. This section also contains technical summary documentation for some chips."It might help CD-i member Stovent to the next stage of his CeDImu Emulator, who describes it as a gold mine!
Would it be possible to ask Motorola and all others for these documents? "I believe not even the MAME people have had much luck so far. Then again, they were mainly interested in CDIC (used by Mono-I) which is not a Motorola chip. I believe the chances of getting internal Philips documentation are slim to none... I think the problem is more getting them found... " according to cdifan. Meanwhile CD-i member Stovent fixed the cursor drawing and is working on need to investigate "why the screen shown is this garbaged. The good thing is that plane B and cursor are perfectly drawn themselves, but the mixing is messed up." He ended up showing the menu logo, but why is it displaying Magnavox? The ROM is from his Philips CD-i 220/40 and it shows Philips on TV (via the real player). It seems that the ROM detects the output. "The PAL/NTSC mode is determined by the response to IKAT command F6 on Port C" - and as Stovent doesn't emulate this part, "writing to it does nothing and reading returns 0 which is why he is stuck with NTSC for now. To get the mouse to work you'll have to start emulating the IKAT anyway..." cdifan helps again.
We highly agree with CD-i member Seventy7: For many CD-i enthusiasts/collectors the details are too complex to follow "but it's neat to easedrop in on". Join us on our CD-i Discord.
[Thanks, Stovent, cdifan]