Reader Question: "The CD-i Community, where do I find it? How to reach them?"

The CD-i Community, what's that? Let's find out where you can find all the people interested in CD-i and the websites that holds the most CD-i information. There are quite some defunct sites and we don't want to create a full list of links, because that would be a big one. We'll focus on the active CD-i Community, which websites are still updated and have people behind it still enthusiastic about CD-i. As we summarize in our Community page, we as Interactive Dreams are on social media as well as our main CD-i blog where you are right now. A quick answer about where to find the CD-i Community is: Social media. The biggest part of this are still Twitter and Facebook.

An easy start on Twitter is to follow us and look who we follow (700 members), as we try to capture the CD-i Community as broad as possible. A more condensed list of what CD-i member Wrestling with Gaming created: The CD-i Cult members. 

On Facebook, there are quite some CD-i related groups, but three of them stand out in size and content:

In order: Magnavox/CD-i Collectors Club (600 members), Philips CD-i Appreciation Group (400 members), The Philips CD-i Community (500 members). If you join these, you probably won't miss a thing.

On Instagram, it looks like we have the only active CD-i account (200 members), but it is steadily growing. When you follow us, you'll gradually find all the CD-i related posts on Instagram.

Another platform that is growing lately is our Discord CD-i server,which you can find here (invitation here). Discord is a chat platform with a dedicated CD-i group here. There are around 160 members currently active (May 2021).

Then we have fora, sometimes a bit outdated due to the modern social media, but there are still a couple of classic forum places about CD-i. The most active is the Reddit CD-interactive forum. Next is The World of CD-i forum.

Next to these pages, there are quite some websites that work on CD-i articles, for you to read, as reference, to learn about the platform, etcetera.. To capture the CD-i Community in 'websites', when you follow these ones you get updated on CD-i pretty nicely: The World of CD-i (focused on the CD-i encyclopedia), Retrostuff CD-i section (focused on repairing CD-i), ICDIA (focused on technical background),  Let's divide the links in topics, depending on what you are looking for:

Your first stop will be the Retrostuff CD-i section, as well as support on Discord, which is currently the most active on this subject.

The World of CD-i offers some nice reviews here, but the language barrier is high, so the text is sometimes hard to read. Thankfully the pictures are nice. The CD-i Completionist also offers nice CD-i reviews. Personally I like the CD-i reviews by HalfblindGamer on Youtube as well. Of course Defunct Games has a great overview of CD-i reviews, although they tend to be pretty harsch on the system.

Assuming you know our own efforts, we recommend the Preserve CD-i blog and its Archive.org place. There are also rare pieces to be found at The World of CD-i. And of course our own The Black Moon Project is a great reference point.

Again The World of CD-i offers a nice list which is fairly complete, but there are some errors in it, and the watermarks hurt the quality a lot, so we recommend alternatives like The CD-i Archive page. At Interactive Dreams, we update our Master Lists. We have a nice (clean) catalogue at The Black Moon Project as well.

Discord is a good start to chat about this. Most info can be found on ICDIA and a couple of Github places (links in our Links on the Web page)

Another topic that is talked about on Discord a lot, including the developers themselves. The CD-i Emulator homepage is also a good start, as well as the CD-i Bits blog, which is owned by the same author of the CD-i Emulator.

[Comment below if we missed anything > we'll update it]