Next to Philips, who made a PC/CD-i board to implement CD-i in a PC setup, there was the company i2m. The I2M CD-i board was a CD-i hardware emulator for the pc. Because its high price (They
didn't sell many) they are very rare! I've never seen anyone for sale. But it is true: we have one in our CD-i Community, which is why, thanks to CD-i members Michiel and cdifan we can show you these pictures.
There where two versions of the card:- Media Playback allows you to play
cd-i titles and movies on your PC. - i2m CD-i Authoring Board enables
you to write CD-i software and test it. The CD-i authoring board is an expansion board that lets developers
create CD-i applications directly on their desktop using an authoring
package such as MediaMogul. In addition, developers may play back
standard CD-i titles (including DigitalVideo, Video-CD and MPEG-1 Real
Time Files) from a CD-ROM drive or emulate CD-i applications from a
local hard drive or over a network.
cdifan, the author of CD-i Emulator, also implemented some pieces of the i2M into CD-i Emulator. cdifan:"I did some work on emulating the I2M Media Playback CD-i board for the
PC (in a sense another completely different player generation). This
board uses a Motorola 68341 so-called "CD-i Engine" processor chip,
which is a CPU32 processor core with some on-chip peripherals (a DMA
controller, two different serial interfaces, a timer, etc), a VDSC video
chip and a completely undocumented "host interface" to the PC bus. So
far the board does not appear to have a separate CD/Audio interface, but
it does have a VMPEG chip. I had already implemented CPU32 emulation
and partial emulation of its on-chip peripherals, but this needed to be
extended a bit more. The main "problem" here appeared to be that these
peripherals appear to ignore address bit 23."
What were these based on? Even when we find one, it will be difficult to
connect it and get it working (you'll need 'old equipment' with an ISA
bus to start with; something we luckily have in the Home Computer
Museum!). "At least the I2M cards did not contain a ROM as the software was downloaded from the PC. The drivers that are part of this can still be downloaded from ICDIA
(so in fact there are some ROM files on ICDIA for years already!). In
CD-i Emulator, the I2M card ROM is already halfway in booting.", cdifan explains.
[Thanks, Erronous (Michiel), cdifan]