CD-i member Vincent Pistoia asks himself a very valid question: "Ive always wondered why there is not a active homebrew scene for the CD-i" - While many other retro gaming platforms actually do have a homebrew scene, efforts in CD-i developments are very scarce. Why is that? The short answer is simple: The CD-i standard is too difficult and (technical) information about the backgrounds is relatively hard (if not impossible) to find.
First about the past: After CD-i was dead after 1999, the first homebrew title was Frog Feast in 2007, which was actually a marvel, a huge potential for future cd-i development. The first follow-up only happened near the end of 2018 with Super Quartet (which is based on the code of Frog Feast) - A very nice effort by Gameblabla. Unfortunately Gameblabla is done with it and won't return to CD-i in its current dev tools state.
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| Frog Feast was the very first CD-i homebrew title, published by Oldergames in 2005 and developed by Rastersoft, the company by Charles Doty |
In the mean time, CD-i member cdifan developed the CD-i Emulator (released in 2005). Cdifan is actually a key person in current CD-i developments. He has a lot of background info as he actually worked as a CD-i developer during the ninetees. Both the initiatives by Charles Doty (Frog Feast CD-i, 2007) and Gameblabla (Super Quartet, 2018) rely on the knowledge by cdifan. That's difficult, because to call it a ' scene' it should not rely on just one person. Unfortunately with CD-i, this is the case at this moment. Read more about CD-i emulation here.
What's next? I'm sure somebody will try in the coming years, and that CD-IZI thing has huge potential, but there's no visible activity now. Anything that is happening 'behind the screens' is there for over ten years already. Anything can change, and I'd love to encourage it, but let's be honest: There's no CD-i homebrew scene at this moment. Lots of ambition, lots of wishes, but hardly anything concrete.
There are promising developments in the field of emulation by the MAME (Mess) team, now that also CD-i is included. Read more about that here.
Also promising is the title development section at The World of CD-i. Omegalfa elaborates on the state of CD-i homebrew: "a new CD-i game homebrew is under development and very promising!
CD-izi is just a few weeks live and [...] hoping for a good goal. After a system is considered dead, it is always hard to bring people ready to available to work on it again for any homebrew project, and CD-i was considered as a bad system, so it is even harder. All initiatives should be welcomed and shared to improve more possibilities for reaching his goal."
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| Super Quartet was released in 2018 on CD-i by Gameblabla. It is, until now, the final effort in CD-i homebrew. |
In the near future we expect the new beta5 version of CD-i Emulator 0.53 will become available, although that can be between next week and next year. The time would be right to have more people help testing right now. There are some small activities in CD-i homebrew, but not as concrete yet as the efforts by Gameblabla or even Charles Doty. Thankfully we still have the knowledge of cdifan and others who are actively learning more about CD-i developing tools.
Arethius RGC is sharing the same thoughts: "Check the Atari jaguar scene more than 30 homebrew game since 2002 and it is considered a bad that actually sold less than 250 000 units world wide. So the reputation of CD-i is not the only thing that was holding the developers, I think the complexity of the system and the lack of tools sere the main issue."
Arethius RGC is sharing the same thoughts: "Check the Atari jaguar scene more than 30 homebrew game since 2002 and it is considered a bad that actually sold less than 250 000 units world wide. So the reputation of CD-i is not the only thing that was holding the developers, I think the complexity of the system and the lack of tools sere the main issue."
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| When Frog Feast was 5 years old (2010), Charles hinted at new CD-i developing projects as well. Eventually, it never happened, but he left us with some nice alfa prototypes. Charles claimed the system was too limited and tech info was not complete/available. |
Omegalfa from The World of CD-i has great news for us: A new CD-i homebrew title is in development! The downside is that he promised a lot in the past years, so we all feel a bit lackluster about it. While it may be true a new guy is busy with 'secret' CD-i development, like a new game, (and which sounds awesome) but that alone is not causing the rise of a full CD-i homebrew scene. Of course the efforts by The World of CD-i are appreciated a lot, but together in open communication we can achieve so much more, that's one thing I've learnt in the past 15 years. The World of CD-i is only online for a few months and they are claiming the world, but the space up till now is empty as anything. We're only here to encourage future plans, but I hope history is not repeating itself :)
As always, Interactive Dreams will stay close to the fire to learn all about the future of CD-i homebrew and CD-i emulation.
[Thanks, Vincent Pistoia, Gameblabla, Omegalfa, cdifan, gameblabla, rosewood, Charles Doty, Arethius RGC, all for their valuable thoughts and opinions]