We often get questions how to recognize if a CD-i demonstration disc is real or fake. We are all sure that there are so many white CD-i demonstration discs printed by Philips Interactive Media of America that they can impossibly all be real. Especially the Nintendo CD-i titles are very popular to pop up as a CD-i demonstration disc: These are easier to print, easier to copy, harder to distinguish from a real one and people apparently still pay good money for them. We recently even saw a PIMA CD-i demonstration disc of The Lost Ride, which is impossible as PIMA did not exist anymore by the time that development started in The Netherlands. They think to buy a rare demo copy, in fact they pay for a cheap CDR recordable disc. Let's talk about a few rules to see if your CD-i demonstration is real or fake:
These discs are all CD Recordables. Pay attention that the back side is silver, not green or any other color. If it’s not silver on the other side it’s home made
- To be 100% sure, post a picture of the other side, especially the center ring of the disc. There is a code inside like you see on the picture above (on the left side). This code is harder to reproduce. If there is no code, you're probably looking at a fake copy.
- Originally I didn't see the circle through the white label on my demonstration discs. It looks like when these covers are printed nowadays, the layer is thinner. The original demonstration discs have a thicker layer, but you will only notice when you have both a real and fake copy next to each other. You can also see differences when you look at the edges of the printed label.
- Always ask for a picture of the back side. A fake might also show up if you read the writing in the data layer on the other side, close to the inner ring, around the middle. You should ask for the code on the inner ring on the back side, that's harder to reproduce.
- Once you have it, you can browse the contents in software like Discjuggler to see when it was written. Perhaps people can fake this too .
- I have to add another thing, as I noticed while going back through our archive that it seems like recent CD-i demonstration discs all use a slightly different font type. In our archive I can find some true old pics of real demonstration discs and they look different compared to the ones that pop up so much lately. The different font is highly suspicious being fake, and with that in mind my feeling that this Zelda's Adventure disc (showed below) is fake is even stronger now.
One thing I'm sure: There are WAY too many demo discs of Zelda's Adventure, it's highly possible that fake copies exist. I would never pay money for these demo discs!
[Thanks, Alfred Lemmon, Retrostuff, Stephen Trigg, Jeff Geske, James Abery]