In the past years we have seen CD-i projects developing adapters which allows us to use Sega or Nintendo gamepads on CD-i. Often these solutions work better compared to the original CD-i gamepads, as original CD-i controllers wear out, are unresponsive and also important: They are increasingly expensive to buy. Another option might be around the corner. CD-i member Marco ConteZero informs us: "Blueretro is an hardware+software interface from an usb hid bluetooth controller to... everything else using a cheap esp32 board. The documentation is still almost nonexistent so it's difficult to see what controllers are already supported and what are only planned in the future but, if you see the photo there is a cd-i game pad and the readme says 232 serial devices will be supported. I know we have megadrive2cdi and snes2cdi adapter but this one will be wireless!"
Developer Jacques Gagnon about his project: "BlueRetro is a multiplayer Bluetooth controllers adapter for various retro game consoles. Lost or broken controllers? Need those rare and obscure accessories? Just use the Bluetooth devices you already got! The project is open source hardware & software. It's built for the popular ESP32 chip. All processing for Bluetooth and HID input decoding is done on a single core which makes it easy for other projects to use the Bluetooth stack within their own project as long the application is running on the other core."
CD-i support in on the agenda, but it is not supported yet. We will update you when we know something more about that.
Check out the project page here with all the links inside to the schematics and current progress.
Here you'll find the releases on Github
[Thanks, Marco ConteZero, Jacques Gagnon, Lewin Day]