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The original hardware CD-i Emulators were used back in the day to develop CD-i titles on while not having to burn (waste) a CD-R disc every time to test a small update. These CD-i hardware Emulators are pretty rare, and we only know of them thanks the units that are in the possession of cdifan. The amount of rare and mostly undocumented CD-i hardware is huge and we need to get some more footage/photos/documentation out there about these devices, Jorne concludes. These E1/E2 emulators might be rare but they are certainly not undocumented. See for example this technical note, this article and this one. "These are nowadays called "ODS" I think, but they required a special connection ("EBU") that indeed only dev players had. Note the E2 emulator did not come with an internal HD, you had to connect it externally (SCSI). Hardware testing is good and required but often not the easiest way to develop!"
Jorne and cdifan share some interesting background on CD-i developing: "Sun workstations were seemingly common in CD-i development, I remember a number of them being listed in the network device list of the BO prototype as well. There's often a way around that by downloading an application into the player over the serial port. It's what Philips used internally. Some other studios I know of that also used them: Codim cv, Eaglevision. There were a few Mac studio's as well, and SPC Vision used PC's. The Mac and PC tool versions always lagged behind the Sun ones... Those sun workstation ran unix based OS's, SunOS. If you read the tech notes you will see a lot of references to them.. How neat would it be if we could piece together the exact kind of setup that philips was using internally. Their standard dev setup was a Sun Microsystems sun3 or sun4 workstation with an E1 emulator and a CDI 180/181/182 or CDI 605 player. Other studios replaced the Sun system with a (usually NuBus) Mac or a Windows 3.1 PC. For basic MediaMogul development you could also get by without a workstation / Mac / PC using the dev player as the workstation. Good thing they made the development options so versatile! They tried to lower the entry level barrier, but it was still quite pricey. See the authoring price list here. - $10K was a big chunk of money in those days! Dev budget for most titles ran into the hundreds of thousands of $$$. Also, a lot of dev projects where co-sponsored by Philips. Some where even 100% paid for, but I think not many."
- Writer/Editor:Jano
- Credits: cdifan, Jorne
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