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| Othello on CD-i was developed by Codim, The Netherlands |
At some point there was an attempt to join forces of SPC Vision with Codim Interactive Media and so SPC/Codim (tentative name) was born. The SPC Vision people moved into the Codim building in Eindhoven because it had room to spare and the SPC building in Oss was becoming very crowded. But the merger didn't pan out, there were differences of opinion at the shareholder/manager level and both companies went their separate ways. A few people shifted companies (in both directions) at this point. I think there's only a single disc out there marked "SPC/Codim" (bonus points if you can name it)! The SPC/Codim episode had (for various reasons) demoralized many game programmers and one by one they left for greener pastures, leaving SPC without the specific "game" expertise but with all its technical CD-i knowledge intact. Many other large and small projects followed, e.g. the Standaard Encyclopedia, Het Staat in de Sterren, Sport Freaks, including a number of professional titles. These were mostly realized in C++, in contrast to most of the game titles that had been written mainly in assembly language.
Jac Goudmsit worked at Codim around these years: "I worked on CD-i productions at Codim between 1994 and 1995. Codim (for some time known as SPC/Codim) was a small but important producer of CD-i titles, many under the Philips name. You probably wouldn't have heard about anything I wrote; I mostly worked on educational titles. But if you look at the small print of many Philips CD-i titles, you'll probably see the Codim name. CD-i started out as a good idea but had one major flaw: All CD-i discs had to be playable on all CD-i players.
Not only did this mean that European (PAL) discs had to be playable in the USA (NTSC) but it also meant that there would never be an upgraded version of CD-i with more memory, a faster CD drive, a hard disk or a network interface (though some of those were available on the professional players). After all, why would anyone invest in a fast CD drive, more memory etc. if all discs would play in the basic system with a 1x speed drive. And why would anyone write a game that could play better in a CD-i player with more features if it was mandatory that it should also play in players that wouldn't have those features.
My favorite CD-i application was: Background music. Philips had a department back then called Background Music Services (BMS). They were a competitor of Muzak (guess who won and competed the other away). Once a month, they would send a box of DAT tapes to Codim, which we recorded to the hard disk of a computer with a special Sony DSP sound card that cost thousands of dollars but could encode audio to ADPCM format in real-time. The computer had a program (programmed in MS-DOS by my predecessor) that would split the two channels (each channel had one track of music) and multiplexed the ADPCM audio into a real-time mode-2 form 2 file. The file would be part of a disc image, as well as another file with text info (such as song titles). The result was something that could be played with a CD-i player or with a special BGM player (google for the Philips BMS 3000).
It could fit 4 to 8 hours of music if I recall correctly. The process of converting one pair of two DAT tapes into one disc image that would go to the factory in Germany, would take a day, and there were usually 10 disc images to be made each month. I wanted to make my own BGM CD but never got around to it. Now the only information about the format that's available on the Internet seems to come from... me. Anyway, I have good memories of working for Codim. It was a great team and we had a lot of fun together. I left because I was getting tired of doing the same thing over and over all the time."
[Thanks, Jac Goudsmit, cdifan]