The upcoming Evercade handheld system by Blaze Entertainment is shaping up to offer new retrogaming experiences. It will be a gaming system that uses its own proprietary cartridges, each currently focused on a specific publisher/system. Including Atari, Namco, Interplay, Technos and Data East. But there are also new retro games specifically for the Evercade console on the Piko Interactive cartridge. Now it may be wishful thinking, but it's not entirely impossible that one of the upcoming cartridges might hold a CD-i classic. Let's read on.
With our CD-i member Shikotei preparing an awesome PC version of our beloved CD-i game "The Apprentice", he recently came across a surprise. Shikotei: "A few months ago I was contacted by a company that claims to have recently acquired the rights to The Apprentice. The rights of The Apprentice CD-i were part of a bundle with a lot of non-cdi titles. It is part of a 'quit claim', something like "If we have the rights, now they are yours" - but without guarantees or source code. That would be difficult due to the many changes from Philips Media to Infogrames, to Atari in the end." If I understood it right the rights of CD-i games were previously located at Atari. Atari decided earlier this year to clean up their portfolio and bring in some cash, so they sold the rights of certain CD-i games to other (smaller) companies (developers). This means in principle chances are getting higher that we will see a re-release of specific CD-i games on PC (steam?) or mobile platforms, including The Apprentice, Dimo's Quest and Steel Machine. Pretty awesome news, at least the rights of CD-i games are not 'lost' as we thought before, but Atari's statement was something like: "Apparently we own the rights, so with this transaction we let them go." It clears the road for developers to do something with these CD-i games, perhaps developing an Evercade cartridge?
2. CD-i Emulation is getting pretty good
In the recent years CD-i member 'cdifan' put a lot of work in Digital Video emulation in his CD-i Emulator. Two years back we were pleased with CD-i Emulator 0.53 beta 4 and the almost similar beta 5 version to play with. You can find compatibility tests here, mainly done by CD-i member 'Topxicemu' (and a bit by myself to play :) - This year in september, CD-i Emulator will exist exactly 15 years. That's quite something! Wouldn't it be nice to think that this opportunity is perfect for a new launch of a new version of CD-i Emulator? Well, that will not be CD-i Emulator 0.53 beta 5, but chances are bigger this will be CD-i Emulator 0.54 or even CD-i Emulator 0.6 - It is on the radar of the author but as always there are never guarantees in life. If we look at the compatibility list we can conclude CD-i emulation is fairly complete and the games are very playable (no significant lag for many of them)
3. Using the free MESS Emulator you can play CD-i games from a raspberry Pi
CD-i Emulation via MAME (The CD-i part is mainly coded by Just Deserts/Harmony/MooglyGuy) is promising, but the outlook on having this integrated in your RetroPie Raspberry Pi is actually pretty amazing. RetroPie.org.uk member 'PatchesSmith' about his project: "Ever since I upgraded to Raspbian Stretch and could compile lr-mess, I wanted to try to get Philips CD-I emulation working. And there you are. It's not perfect, but it's currently the best CD-I emulation that I am aware of for RetroPie. Hopefully speed can be increased in future updates. Some games will run better than others, and I am sure some games have bugs in MAME that have yet to be fixed, so you will need to ask around. I should note that cdimono1 tends to run at 100% on my laptop, so hopefully we can see improvements in Pi optimization soon." There's for sure potential for this!
So which games should make a chance to be included?
The games by The Vision Factory by far, as those rights have been sold recently and their size and playability is a start for success. Most of our members value these CD-i games the most:
1. The Apprentice
2. Dimo's Quest
3. Alien Gate
4. Steel Machine
5. Golden Oldies (4 games in total)
6. Accelerator
In view of rights it may be more difficult to include Lucky Luke in this...
Also interesting are the DIMA/Creative Media games:
7. Christmas Crisis
8. Christmas Country
9. Family Games
10. Whack a Bubble
The downside of the Christmas CD-i platformers is that they require the Digital Video Cartridge, so this requires more data and power. (if MESS would be the core engine, this is still not possible)
And a few other games that we believe the rights are traceable:
11. Zenith (Radarsoft)
12. Laser Lords (Spinnaker/Philips)
13. Mega Maze (it all depends on who bought the rights...)
Again, for now it remains wishful thinking, but we're confident that CD-i games will return to the public in a form that will do justice to them. We'll keep you posted :)