Have you visited the Home Computer Museum in Helmond, The Netherlands? Not only does it host the biggest CD-i collection worldwide, it is also organizing our CD-i Communuty Day on December 3, celebrating the 30th anniversary of CD-i this year. With the recent attention to preserving CD-i this collection is of high interest as it still holds a lot of rare and unknown CD-i titles. It looks like it is happening soon: These CD-i discs will be preserved as well! Bart, owner of the museum: "Sure, we're up for that. We're currently digitizing everything we received from Codim. Backup tapes with sources and such. As well as newspaper articles, promotional material etc. [About preserving tools:] We have it all. Windows 10 / Linux with sata, ide and SCSI and a Windows 98 with currently only IDE. The latter we use to create 360K disks. There are also 3 floppy drives and a ZIP-drive in there (and support for USB)."
A list of all CD-i titles which are available in the museum you can find on the website of ICDIA. cdifan, website master of ICDIA: "It is not a list of known titles, all the listed ones should be present there. But next week I will take a detalied set of "spine" pictures of the professional discs to verify this, we did not do so when initially putting the collection there so I currently have no way to verify. Might be a bit difficult for those missing info on the spine but we will see." CD-i member Blazers was wondering the same thing: "Actually all physically discs are present at the Home Computer Museum, or is that list (and the others) simply a registry of known CDi titles? I was wondering because quite a few known titles aren't on any of the ICDIA lists, and upcoming preservation efforts might want to especially focus on securing known titles that aren't among the ones from ICDIA. Having a dedicated ReDumping setup at the Home Computer Museum that provides regular newly preserved images would be an amazing way of connecting with the community. I know that I'd eagerly anticipate the upcoming rips. On a similar tangent, are there any plans for a gallery of all the discs and case covers to be added to the site? I know bandwidth was limited back in the 90s but surely today it would be easy to make such a great "virtual exhibit"/online showcase of what's in the collection..." To answer that, at Interactive Dreams we have the plan of creating a gallery of the whole CD-i collection in the future. This is a really exciting time for CD-i!
In the meantime, Jorne donated his BO prototype to the museum as well. Jorne: "A while back, I reported on this CD-i related prototype machine. Today I finished the page compiling everything there is to know about the Philips Model BO videosynthesizer and how it relates to the CD-i. Hope you all have fun reading through it! I should also mention: The machine will soon be on display at the HomeComputerMuseum in Helmond. So, if you want to see the machine for yourself, you will soon be able to do so! https://www.cfretro.net/Articles/philipsproto.php"
- Editor: Ralph
- Credits: Bart, Jorne
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/Philips.CDi.Zone/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/Interact_Dreams
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/interactivedreams/
- Discord: https://discord.gg/UDDJ4e8aPN