Here you see some details of the CD-i 615/17 Professional CD-i player. Ove the years many of the professional CD-i players were highlighted here at Interactive Dreams, even the CD-i 615. Sometimes mistaken for an authoring player, this is not one of them. This is not an authoring/development machine.
Its purpose and unique feature is groupworking and document sharing, e.g. in classrooms. For development purposes you’d need a player with higher hardware specs. This CD-i 615 has a built-in floppy drive so you might confuse it for an authoring player. The floppy drive was used to save/load files, for example in meetings or in classrooms.
You were able to link several CD-i 615 players together, and by using 1 floppy you could have all players to show the same screen. That was a smart feature at that time, with special purpose in business or education environments. As it was not sold as a consumer player, this CD-i 615 professional player is pretty rare.
The CD-i 615 proffesional CD-i player was released in 1996, so
that is already pretty late in the lifespan of CD-i. We have seen this more often, like with the follow up: CD-i 660 and CD-i 740.
This CD-i 615/17 is a professional player with floppy disk drive, parallel and AT keyboard ports and integrated Digital Video. The system was able to communicate with other CDI 615 players, especially designed for classroom applications where user data could be retrieved by a central operator. (as used during courses & trainings)
Retrostuff: "I'd love to have one of these to take it apart. But I'd rather go for a 615/00 than for a 615/17, also to avoid import taxes. This model cannot be used for programming/authoring purposes. It was designed for networking/classroom applications."
[Thanks, CD-i member xsuicidesn0wmanx, geon_dp]
