Let's review back some basic specifications of the CD-i platform. The CD-i or Compact Disc Interactive, created by Philips, Sony and Matsushita, was the first multimedia CD player in the world. It was capable of playing full motion videos from a Video-CD (using the Digital Video Cartridge extension – DVC), watching your favourite photos on a Photo-CD, listening to music from a standard Audio-CD and of course playing games, educational, professional and multimedia titles thanks to the CD-i standard. You are also able to sing karaoke songs by playing CD+Graphics discs, listening to 8 hours of background music on a single disc thanks to CD-BGM, bringing hybrid CD's that offer CD-Audio content and CD-i ready multimedia thanks to CD-i Ready, and it also allows some supporting CD formats like CD-Text, CD-Midi and CD-i Bridge. The CD-i Ready format is a type of bridge format, also designed by Philips, that defines discs compatible with CD Digital audio players and CD-i players. This format puts CD-i software and data into the pregap of Track 1. The CD-i Bridge format, defined in Philips' White Book, is a transitional format allowing bridge discs to be played both on CD-ROM drives and on CD-i players. The CD-i format was developed by Philips, Sony and Matsushita back in 1986, and is specified in the Green Book (“Red book” for the audio CD and “Yellow book” for the CD ROM) which contains all the specifications of a CD-i player and protocols. Compared to the Yellow Book (specification for CD-ROM), the Green Book CD-i standard solves synchronisation problems by interleaving audio and video information on a single track.
The official first launch date of CD-i was October 15, 1991 (in USA)
Basic CD-i specifications (depending on different models):
Basic CD-i specifications (depending on different models):
- Motorola 68070
- Clock speed of 15.5Mhz
- NV RAM of 8kb or 32kb
- 1Mb of RAM
- DVC extension MPEG-1 offering 1Mb extra RAM
- CD drive speed 1x
- Graphics Chip SCC66470 or MCD 212
- Resolution 384×280 to 768×560
- Custom or MCD 221 Sound chip
- 16 bit stereo sound
- Operating system CD-RTOS (Microware OS-9)
[Thanks, wikipedia, Devin, CD-i fan, blurb69, omegalfa, retrostuff, Dan, Arethius]