Philips CD-i

[strange crater]

CD-i Emulator has a few titles running. Generally, I’ve heard the goal is to get the main hardware done first, and see from there.

[tacit garden]

I mean, if someone wanted to buy one, pull it apart, reverse engineer it - it would take a real cd-i pervert though.
Hmm, there's one in the Netherlands for about 100 USD. Not planting seeds or anything.

[strange crater]

I have two with DVCs. Believe Slamy has one, as well

[wintry dust]

a case full of custom ICs

[tacit garden]

Well that just sounds like.......A WHOLE LOT OF FUN 😄

[merry oyster]

I leave for a couple hours and things got crazayyyy around here!

[viral pine]

Someone on YT asked if Super Mario Whacky Worlds works. Anyone know?

[bright zinc]

depends on what your definition of works is

[viral pine]

Loads and displays something resembling a game

[iron valley]

I'm testing it right now. It laods the main prototype menu, but I haven't been able to get the levels to load just yet.

[viral pine]

Thanks for the info

[iron valley]

It's honestly incredible to me that you already have this thing loading actual games... This is just astounding.

[iron valley]

I got levels to load now. They have a flashing pixel bar at the bottom, but they play!

[bright zinc]

I played a level or 2, but the game is notoriously glitchy and kind of broken was the joke there

[iron valley]

Lots of flashing as you move around, and the pixel bar at the bottom is constantly flashing, but the levels are playable. I had just forgotten how you even load them initially. (Move the cursor arrow over a level 1, 2, 3 etc, and hit a button).

I'm able to get in game and "play" Zelda's Adventure, but the background is garbled pixels. This is still very exciting progress, and I'm loving testing this.

[errant stratus]

do we have a list of things that do something yet?

[strange crater]

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12cTVcAyMx-3qqcodo3qXigxNu5yv55IVAeR9qvchOhQ/edit?gid=0#gid=0

This is per what everyone's reported in testing so far

[errant stratus]

I'm missing something. I changed the MiSter file, put the rbf in _consoles, copied the cdi200.rom to boot0.rom and the zx405042p__cdi_slave_2.0__b43t__zzmk9213.mc68hc705c8a_withtestrom.7206 to boot1.rom in usb0/cd-i (I'm on a hard drive), copied some chd files and a couple of bin/cue folders to that folder and rebooted. Starting up the core, I get to the "Philips Compact Disc Interactive" screen. I hit f12 and hit "insert disc cue/chd" and the folder comes up showing the CHDs and individual game folders. I select one and nothing happens.

[bright zinc]

try hitting play button in the bios

[kindred cosmos]

Does this core play redbook audio CDs fine, like other cores do? My go-to core for listening to music is the PSX core with the PSOne BIOS, but I'm always interested in new ways.

[errant stratus]

I did. screen turns cyan with some line garbage and just sits there

[stiff flare]

I don’t want to alarm you

But you have a cat on your head

[errant stratus]

I've tried resetting and closing osd after loading the chd or whatever.

using redump bin/cue zips extracted and mess cd-i chd archive.

[bright zinc]

maybe never rebooted after mister file change, or make sure to try one of the games listed as working

[errant stratus]

tried wand of gamelon and arcade classics

[marble comet]

Im actually having the exact same right now. Experimenting. Exactly the same output you describe

I feel confident the problem is me, but im not seeing it yet 🙂

I fixed it by replacing the main, actually.

I was originally trying to leave my normal main in place, and was using a custom main for the core, in the INI, but I must have done it wrong

[errant stratus]

I rebooted for the 4th time and now I get something. I start the core, load the file close the osd and hit the play button EXACTLY LIKE TEH LAST 4 Times and now it came up. neato

[marble comet]

if it helps, i figured out my custom-core setting. all is working now.

[errant stratus]

nevermind, lol

[marble comet]

i was using "[CDi]", based on the core filename. It's "[CD-i]"

though, to be candid, im using "[CD-i*]" due to a lack of my own confidence

[undone nimbus]

i miss when my dad owned a 240 polar estate, such an epic car

the automotive equivalent of the cd-i perhaps

[spring gate]

No audio in the core yet, but at some point it should support audio CDs as images/bin-cue/chd

[compact nest]

What a shock that this is now a thing! Now I can more safely infl- I mean pass on my gen 1 CD-i to a good home.

[kindred cosmos]

Sweet. Looking forward to that. :3

Now we need someone to make a SNAC adapter for the CD-i controllers.

[spring gate]

Was discussed a week or two back, blue may look into it when time comes 🙂

[lunar nexus]

Slamy is doing a great job, what do you think of the core? Running stuff already.

Long way to go, but playable stuff now. Tried a few titles. Great stuff - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkPo6eQrBxk

[dawn iris]

😂

[modern mirage]

#1103404843512631357 message

Those videos are to be put in Share Media

[ember granite]

Soon this baby can go back in the box 😁

Yes I'm a true fan of the system. And I'm so grateful for the core. Thank you ❤️

[nocturne vortex]

😬

I bet dragons lair runs well. I mean runs like dragons lair

I just played on a real cab a few weeks ago again and it was a good reminder that I was right to hate it as a kid

[ember granite]

I didn't know any better. 😁 Still have to get the Remastered edition somewhere.

[nocturne vortex]

I hated it as a kid because it was like $1 a play for like 10s of play where you couldn’t even tell why you failed

[ember granite]

I liked Mad Dog with the light gun

[ember granite]

That must've been the arcades.. 😅

[unreal sparrow]

How is Lucky Luke ?

[ember granite]

Luckily I grew up with Atari, Sega, Commodore, Amiga (Philips), and Nintendo. Never needed to pay for the arcade systems. 😅

[nocturne vortex]

Yeah I’m 45 so I got a good amount of time in arcades in the late 80s/90s. Good times, lost times

[ember granite]

It's a pretty hard platform game and a bit clunky. But definitely worth a try. I don't remember it very well. Could also be a one level game with stuff dropping from the sky

https://youtu.be/npp5zImx820?si=f9AC7T9jIoON9965

Easier to judge this way for you 😊

Is there already an archive for these games somewhere? I can't find my copy of Link 😵‍💫

I remember having that one in Dutch

[unreal sparrow]

Thank you for those informations 🙂

[nocturne vortex]

Damn point blank murders barrel guy like a tall dorky John wick

[undone nimbus]

which of these would you say is best?

[fast jacinth]

oh, if you're new here, slamy's actually been pulling CD-i consoles apart. multiple models of it in fact. we're all CD-i perverts in this thread but he's the true king among us.

[undone nimbus]

i remember back in the day the apprentice and burn cycle got praised by Power Unlimited, the dutch game magazine, but i havent played either

[fast jacinth]

i don't want to misquote slamy here but: yes, it would be the last feature to be implemented. my understanding is there's potential to just glom the guts of the PSX core's exiting MPEG encoding module over, but it's still a distant thing. mind you i'm not a developer i'm just chatGPT-ing the past few months of CD-i shitposts for you lol

[tacit garden]

Noted, and figured. I mean you'd have to be, right? ☺️

[ember granite]

Tetris for the Sound Track, Pac Panic

[fast jacinth]

the flowers of robert mapethorpe corrupted my impressionable brain. no going back.

[slim geode]

My one experience with the CD-i as a kid was going to some kid's house and he was playing this game with the IR remote 😂

[stiff flare]

I played Surf City on a CDi at Incredible Universe once.

[earnest kraken]

Seeing a bluescreen right now. Does the Wand of Gamelon rom need a certain header?

[stiff flare]

it needs a custom MiSTer build

Check the pins, it’s listed there

[earnest kraken]

I see it now 👍

[dawn iris]

Perhaps pin the Tipp with the ini for the other mister main too, that make things easier for all.

[stiff flare]

Yeah that’s a good idea

Thanks!

I need to do fancy pins for this channel at some point

[raw leaf]

The CD-I didn't have fancy pins

[sinful hornet]

This was actually a fantastic tip that I wish I knew with testing the n64 core

[dawn iris]

Yes, was also new for me. Had not read it anywhere else before.

[stiff flare]

EHHHH

[dawn iris]

cool

I wait for sound before i redownload all files again. Have tried some converter, but i am not able to convert the single bin in a chd...

[stiff flare]

@finite portal ^

[finite portal]

It's beautiful 🥹

[strange crater]

https://tenor.com/view/philips-cd-i-gif-7017728350802935

[errant island]

Image I can actually hear.

[rugged panther]

haha I'm playing Wind Waker right now

[stiff flare]

Yeah it a cool game, the triforce hunt is a slog but I enjoyed it a lot

[rugged panther]

Is that the part that's improved on Wii U?

[stiff flare]

Yeah I think they cut it down quite a bit

[rugged panther]

Sweet I don't even remember that part of the game lol

[viral pine]

The fast sail was the best addition

[tawdry arrow]

Fast sail and the tingle maps that show you where the triforce pieces are

[fast jacinth]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hC3H-wv7SU curious if the chat has a favorite CDi youtube poop. this is a rare one but i think about it daily

[strange crater]

Copied over my CD-i collection to the MiSTer. Filling in the blanks in my database sheet with more info.

One thing I'm definitely noticing is that many games have corrupted still image backgrounds. Voyeur is a good example of that - the FMV is running correctly, but the still backgrounds look quite strange:

Are CD-i Ready titles working as .CHD? I tried a multi-.BIN title, and it didn't seem to recognize.

[stiff flare]

They’re working as CHD

It’s a miracle the core is even loading games right now, so there’s going to be ton of issues

[terse flare]

My upload on sunday was very work in progress. This is why it was tied to a name of a game to celebrate that it was working at all. The MCD212 has many video modes and it is indeed a miracle that it shows any visuals at all. It is feature incomplete right now.
Here is a list of all possible base video modes that can be fetched from RAM

The red arrow shows the supported video modes right now. This also means that most games just use CLUT7 in either RLE or Bitmap mode. Every deviation from CLUT7 will result in visual glitches right now.

[terse flare]

This made me curious. The CD-i code for the Main is just a copy of the PSX core. This would mean that the PSX core also doesn't support multi bin.... maybe it was a bad idea to copy that instead of PCE or MegaCD

[wintry dust]

it does, although it's been a bit weird in the past

actually I think I'm remembering single bin-multi track being weird. multi bin should be fine

[terse flare]

Maybe this shall be pinned. Please don't expose your TFT monitor to the CD-i core for longer periods of time. Yesterday during a presentation at the local maker space it has caused DC bias on one of the LCD screens as the flickering pattern at the top and the bottom is actually oscillating. This is not good as it causes image retention.

[unreal sparrow]

I was astonished to see some variant of CDi hardwares have different chips by checking this website on the readme of the github page of the core https://github.com/cdifan/cdichips
It could implied some issues of content compatibility.

[terse flare]

Yes, this is why we are aiming for MONO I right now.

[unreal sparrow]

Ok MONO is the more common ?

[terse flare]

The CD-i is not a hardware specification but a software specification. This is why some of the existing emulators don't simulate the chips but instead just the behaviour. Here is a list of all CD-i models.
https://www.cdiemu.org/?body=site/players.htm

And another one
http://icdia.co.uk/players/comparison.html

[unreal sparrow]

I see !

[terse flare]

cdifan is a very important person in the CD-i community. I'm also in the CD-i discord server and there are many people who have secret and sacred knowledge. He is the author of the emulator called just "CD-i Emulator". Sadly it is closed source and I have a feeling that this impacts future development of anything related to this device. They also didn't believe I would just upload the Verilog code. There seems to be something different with their mindset. Luckily cdifan shares the code in secret. Maybe this is how MAME started to support the CD-i

But MAME too also only addresses the Mono-I hardware. Documentation of the CD-i is very bad. The github repo you have posted is incomplete. There is so much info lacking. This is why starting a CD-i core on the MiSTer is a little bit insane. It will never be cycle accurate when it comes to Audio for example. The final product will be an interpretation of a CD-i compatible device.

[unreal sparrow]

Yes the documentation is the key ... hope some information could be accessible on the future

thanks for those informations

[spring gate]

What is the blocker for audio never being cycled accurate?

[pulsar moth]

I am reminded of Rinne. Series by Rumiko Takahashi. Worth watching, but has about 6 percent of the fanbase of her previous series.

[wintry dust]

time to start developing asic reversing skills!

[nocturne vortex]

Weird, wonder why since I highly doubt any lawyers would chase after cdi stuff and the piles of money being made so instead it’s weird knowledge gatekeeping in the cdi world? Actually kind of sounds like the 3DO group does that too, hoards info on some pretext instead of having it published in the open.

[finite portal]

You used to see similar things in the Neo Geo community. It's a power trip thing.

[nocturne vortex]

Yeah guess you’d lose whatever power / control over your niche community you have if they no longer need you for info

[finite portal]

Retro gaming. Where the stakes are low and the drama is high.

[errant island]

Gatekeeping, internal dramas.
Neo Geo, 3DO and CD-i.
Dealing with it since at least 25 years.

[deep roost]

And the thing that disturbs me, is that drama like this never ends. It's still happening to this day (see: ||Duckstation, Teknoparrot, Near, RetroArch in general, and Pramod vs Mister||).

[finite portal]

Best thing that ever happened to the Neo Geo forums was ||the admin shake up a few years ago. Sucked a lot of the poison out of that community.||

[abstract oyster]

Curiously, the people who reach some of the biggest achievements, like Robert or srg320, are completely out of the drama. Some people forget that this is all about videogames and having fun...

[deep roost]

Thankfully, their achievements outweigh the silliness from the FPGA emulation community.

[stiff flare]

Honestly a lot of the blame falls to the community. We put up with narcissistic jerks because we think they’re the only ones who can deliver something we want.

The sooner we can identify and kick those people out of our communities the better everyone is. Retro gaming is about having fun playing old games. Drama has no place here.

[lavish crow]

I think another problem is apathy or lack of interest in the more obscure stuff. This is why I'm so excited about having CD-i being preserved regardless of 'quality'

[stiff flare]

Yeah, great point. I can only speak for myself but I definitely had apathy for the CDi going in. I mean I appreciate a new core regardless, but CDi wasn’t high on my list.

Then I started going through the library, reading up on it, and watching videos. You know what? The system is genuinely pretty cool! I’m really stoked to play the games and check out all the fun multimedia made for it. I’m super excited for this core and the amazing progress it’s made. I honestly think it’ll open a lot of people’s eyes to the CDi and help bring in a ton of interest to the platform.

I think apathy is partly fueled by access. It’s hard to be excited about something you cannot enjoy. This core is going to fix that! 💪

[iron valley]

I used to attempt to play it back when you had to use MESS to do it, and it was really convoluted, but I finally figured it out and it was so exciting. A while later, they made a Retroarch core for it, making it far more accessible, so I played a lot more on it and kept things organized. I've been DYING for the leap to FPGA. This is very exciting.

[modern mirage]

or Retroarch stole the mame core is more like it

[iron valley]

I don't know of the inner workings of all that. I just noticed it appear in the cores one day.

[modern swan]

I only own one CDi game, and it's Tetris. I've never owned the console, but have always been intrigued by it for unexplained reasons. I'm excited to see how far this goes

[modern mirage]

I played one on launch, was unimpressed and never went back

there again I loathe FMV games

[valid onyx]

Was cleaning out storage yesterday in prep of getting rid of said storage. Found (well - spotted :)) the box labelled 'CD-i'! Unf. could not get to the box itself, as other boxes were on top of it and time ran out, but probably will discover the Treasures there tomorrow.

I know it will NOT contain both Zelda games, as I know I sold those to a friend a few years ago.

Don't remember which exact model, but I believe I have the top loader, and my dad has the front loader. IIRC both with the dvm. Will see soon!

I am really enjoying the mister 🙂 Having everything at my fingertips and hooked up is exactly the experience I was hoping to get, and I am surprised at how much more 'real' it feels to play psx, snes, n64 etc. games on it vs on pc-based emulators. I aim to get rid of all (well... most. Too much sentimental memories about my atari lynx) of my old consoles as I don't use them due to the fiddlyness of it all. There were 2 systems in my collection without proper mister support; one being the jaguar, and the other, you're addressing: the CD-I 🙂

And yes, here in the Netherlands, neo geo was indeed teenage-mind-blowing expensive, as were the games. Looking forward to playing some Metal Slug soon! Also need to figure out how to dive into the staggering amount of arcade-cores

[dawn iris]

Wasn't the Netherlands not the "home" for the CDI? I cant really remember, but i got no one, cause it was just to expensive all the time.

But i was impressed about the laserdisc like games for it.

[errant island]

Yes, there is also a museum near the Philips HQ.

[dawn iris]

It's a shame what is Philips today. They are now mostly in the medical business and do also the light things. But that's all iirc. They also sold the senseo part to some chinese.

[quasi crystal]

@errant island 'het evoluon' in Eindhoven

[dawn iris]

But we have similar german brands that act almost the same like Philips. Telefunken, Grunding, Nordmende, etc.

[quasi crystal]

Miele

[dawn iris]

Did you see the offer on misterfpga.org for a real CDI-Unit? @terse flare

[quasi crystal]

once the core goes is working I'll write a FAQ

haven't been keeping track of changes yet

@dawn iris somewere in here is an overview of philips' journey into game consoles

videopac/videopac+/p2000/msx1/msx2/nms pcs/CDi

CD-i always felt like a pet project of a few engineers

[dawn iris]

Was the thing with the foil keyboard not a clone from another vendor? That time is was more homecomputer focused and missed many consoles.

[terse flare]

You mean the offer by the user seastalker? We are way ahead. This person lives in the USA and I had quite some offers here from locals. Also one from Solingen. In the end I got a machine from Aachen. This is the one I'm currently... frankensteining....

[dawn iris]

Oh, cool and nice to know.

[terse flare]

This is maybe a question for the mods. Up until now I've just published the cores here in this thread. Is this the intended way? Do we have reached a state in which I just upload them to test-builds like Robert did with N64?

[stiff flare]

If you want more attention on it then hell yeah, start posting them in #test-builds

But I’d clarify anything additional required to test, like the MiSTer main build you made

[wintry dust]

probably worth being aware that once you start posting it in a more "public" place you're going to get more "tech support" interactions than you do now

so you gotta figure out when you're ready for that

[stiff flare]

That’s a great point!

[terse flare]

I don't want more attention. I'm currently fine with the hyperactive people here.

[wintry dust]

I mean who doesn't want more "does game X work!?!?!?" during development

[modern mirage]

why doesnt this core Play my Virtua Cop 3 set ?

its rubbish !!

[spring gate]

I personally would keep to this channel until you are a bit further along. Everyone in here should know what the score is, but at soon as you post in test channels it will be seen by a lot more people out of context, and no doubt be shared widely outside of this Discord, and as mentioned you will wind up with "Why doesn't Mario work? Core broken!" Messages

Just to double check, is the FW in the core up to date and has anyone tried the core through one of the 4K scalers that make use of the metadata? Does the core look as it should in a 4K screen?

[terse flare]

Who is even able to answer this? MiSTer sys is recent. The last update was quite a long time ago.

[spring gate]

That's great, it presumably all works fine then. Not sure if anyone with a Tink or a Morph has double checked. Maybe something @viral pine has looked at

[terse flare]

I forgot to answer you. The CDIC was never fully analyzed. Existing implementations are based on reverse engineering attempts using disassembly of the CD driver. The full feature set to talk to it has to be in the ROM to conform the CD-i standard. The applications should not talk to the hardware. The CDIC also has micro code inside which makes this even more awful.

[spring gate]

Ah OK, so there is no way any hardware Wizard can extract/dump/decap-and-trace this one?

[terse flare]

I can reverse that question and ask why it wasn't done yet.😭
It would also help to at least have a datasheet. Even that doesn't exist.

[dawn iris]

Thought microcode is only used to correct some behavior done false in hardware before?

[spring gate]

Not sure if @fringe marsh maybe has some insight here, he was looking a bit at CDi before but not sure if he came across this issue

[terse flare]

This thing is an actual DSP. It communicates to the main CPU by a shared memory. This was the reason people have discovered that it has a life on its own.
...It is not that bad. It will still work with the current data. We maybe need some audio expert who will analyze the audio for differences in the frequency spectrum.

[spring gate]

That is definitely something that could be looked at once audio is implemented. Sadly there is no CDi MD Fourier, but still ways to compare audio recordings from the core against audio recordings from real hardware

[terse flare]

I can totally imagine people fabricating CD-i software to stimulate the audio and generate bode diagrams.

[spring gate]

I wonder if anyone has looked into CDi 240p/MDF, will have a quick dig

[dawn iris]

The question is if it really an philips own thing, or based on some dsp design from other vendors.

[viral pine]

whats the question?

ahh I see...I can check

not today but this week

[dawn iris]

Is CDI- Compatible with the different modells? If so, why not easy use one of the chips (motorola), were the doku is there? @terse flare

https://github.com/cdifan/cdichips

[spring gate]

Cool, one more thing that can be ticked off at this stage

[dawn iris]

If i unterstand it right, the chips do all the same, CD-Inferface and ADPCM Audio.

[terse flare]

The question is relevant. It is a good question. I'm unable to find a schematic which only has the DSP. You are of course right that the Motorola 56k is well documented. But is always has CDIC as the interface to the CPU and the RAM. I've only checked Mono-I and Mono-II so far.

[dawn iris]

i Could check in an Amiga forum too, they are guys who build the AA3000+ with a motorla DSP, i guess its the same chip. They also wrote software for it.

[viral pine]

@fierce shoal might be able to check too before me as he has a Tink

[spring gate]

A little nugget from Artemio

[terse flare]

I'm not sure if this is helping right now. There has to be a reason why most emulation attempts are going for Mono-I hardware. I'm aware that I'm doing more right now than the MAME guys and cdifan is going for. We have the actual SLAVE controller running in real hardware after all which gives us quite some options. I'm not sure if the ROM code of the DSP can just be extracted. This is something that should be discussed on the CD-i Discord server.

Concerning the CD stuff we have to be careful. There is a certain portion which will never be executed on the FPGA parts. The DSP code might only be helpful to extract the actual filters on the audio samples to get the most accurate sound output.

[spring gate]

I don't know how comparable it is, but @fringe marsh has been doing work on implementing Super Cassette Vision audio that was only done at a high level on Mame, and has been implementing a ROM for sound properly, and will lead to much more accurate audio in SCV emulation as a result. I am not on the technical level to understand all this work, but he may be able to shed some light on things as this may be in his wheelhouse

[dawn iris]

I guess you could do the rom extract. That time there wasn't most no protection in any form. @terse flare

[quasi crystal]

@terse flare as you (might not) know - I've written tutorials in the past (N64/PSX/MSX/Saturn) which are quite popular. The goal was to keep most of the questions away from FPGAZumSpass so he could focus on development instead of answering a lot of questions.

Would you be interested in having a FAQ? Here is an example:

https://mister.vampier.net/N64/

@spring gate you're going to make a compatability list again? 😉 this one will be much shorter than the n64/PSX lists

[terse flare]

I don't know how Robert has handled it in the past. He was also present on the cores channel. I do realize that I don't have to respond on every chit chat around here. Sometimes there are good suggestions here. But sometimes it is not really helping or just too much at all. When the 5th person tells me, that there are glitches on game X and I know that already, it of course doesn't help development. It is the same with the playback speed of the FMVs. Of course I know that. Or that Zelda is running too fast.

[terse flare]

I think I remember that somewhere above one person has started a list. They have marked quite some games as "Working" even so, we have no Audio 😄

In the end there should be only one list.

[quasi crystal]

I'll just start a FAQ 😉 people really want to see Zelda CDI

agreed - but working doesn't really tell us anything - comment field etc.

[terse flare]

I thought too. But it seems they really want "Thunder in Paradise". The people only want what they don't have yet. xD

[quasi crystal]

I haven't setup the core yet

will do that soon and document the process - any documentation on the channel?

[dawn iris]

Quite normal 😂

[terse flare]

The github page gives some instructions on the setup. It is also pinned in this channel

[quasi crystal]

got it

will use that as a base - thanks

[dawn iris]

Include the pins, that have some usefull hints, as long as a own mister main is reguired.

[quasi crystal]

[CD-i]
main=MiSTer_CDi

wait you can now define a customer MiSTer file?

that's handy

[terse flare]

I didn't knew that either. Full of surprises, this thing

[quasi crystal]

it's pinned

[strange crater]

Yeah, I should change that to “Playable” lol

Will do that

[quasi crystal]

no boot = black screen

boots = boots but game/program can't be started

Playable = is plays but can have glitches (audio/video whatever)

complete-able = I finished the game

Perfect = I can't see a difference between this and a real CDi

Perfect in this case will be harder to define as there aren't a lot of CDi users out there

@strange crater if you have a list please link it here and I'll add it to the FAQ

if you're the owner please make sure to limit the list to trusted people

and ad a comment field

[strange crater]

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12cTVcAyMx-3qqcodo3qXigxNu5yv55IVAeR9qvchOhQ/edit

[quasi crystal]

request sent

oh perfect

god my eyes!! pastel colors rule

I'll make a summary page like I did above

[spring gate]

I am planning to once that new pack is finished that has all the titles in different folders depending on what type of software it is. Having a 2000+ entries long sheet of all of the no intro titles with no sorting isn't practical

[dawn iris]

Should we not concentrate on Games first? Seems a lot more less?

Also real Mpeg will come late.

[spring gate]

If we had the organised pack there there would be a folder of all the US games, one for the EU games etc. with different tabs for each, so it would make testing games easier

That no intro pack is such a nightmare I don't have the HDD space on my laptop to download it all let alone extract it, you also can't torrent it last I tried

[strange crater]

I should have that soon. Look for “No-DVC Testing Pack”.

[spring gate]

If someone can organise it all and make CHD versions then they are doing god's work here

[strange crater]

If anyone can give me some advice on CHD compression for CD-i titles, I’d appreciate it. So far, it’s been a bit of a nightmare.

[spring gate]

At this stage it may be worth keeping them bin/cue, CHD conversions can in theory lead to issues. For the eventual complete pack everything in CHD would be great for space if nothing else

[strange crater]

I’ve heard that multitrack CD-i Ready titles work in CHD, but not multi-BIN. I haven’t been able to test those yet because of it

[errant island]

For the tests, it would be preferable to perform it with a BIN/CUE set first.
Not like with the SEGA CD and Saturn sets which were revealed to be problematic at one point.

[quasi crystal]

my CDi collection is 34GB and is bin/cue

not sure if chd is supported yet

[stiff flare]

CHD works

[strange crater]

My no-DVC Games collection is 49.7GB of zip-compressed .BIN & .CUE. I'll be splitting it up by category to save time.

[errant island]

My CDi collection should be around 1.2TB.
I need to tidy up with the base from Elphive + my personal additions through the years (mostly CD-i Video).

[stiff flare]

Damn y’all keep one upping each other haha

[modern mirage]

I have 7 Pb they are all the same game though !

[strange crater]

Interesting - how many VCD discs do you have? And you've verified they all have the CD-i player?

[errant island]

Around 580 titles, we've been collectors with my uncle during the 90s.

Sadly most of the collection was burned down during a house fire last July, I have only the backup and some scans (but not everything anymore).

I've refrained to share them online as MPAA and such.

The rest of the CD-i collection is with the Non-Redump and part in Redump now too.

[strange crater]

Makes sense. They manufactured new discs up until at least the 2010s.

[quasi crystal]

https://mister.vampier.net/cdi/

[tawdry arrow]

Most CDi games I saw were like Karaoke discs and like users manuals

[quasi crystal]

the FAQ has begun

will work on it later tonight

time to get back to work

[tawdry arrow]

But I am excited to play the Zelda games and Rise of the Robots of course

One of those games I had as a kid and have zeronclue how I got it

[undone nimbus]

i still think hotel mario is okay as a game

one thing it did that i think was a first was having a theme to the enemies based on the part of the game they were in (the hotel in this case)

[errant island]

Lucky Luke and The Apprentice are interesting to see at least.

[undone nimbus]

Also koopalings that look like their pictures in the SMW manual

[quasi crystal]

lovely stuff - childhood memories 😄

[errant island]

Recreated on my side just now, 41.6GB in t7z.

And the list seems correct, no forgotten title apart the JPN one.

[strange crater]

I think I did some edits to it - hold on

[errant island]

I tried to catch them when I was living in the country but neither appeared on online private auctions nor on specialized stores in Tokyo, Osaka and such.

That was only for verifying if I had some more stuff on that part.

[errant island]

Okay, I see some changes like with the DVC Enhanced.

I don't understand come changes.
You removed Sandy's Circus on the Europe set and France set, but kept it as "Sandy's Zirkus Abenteuer" in Germany.

Section 1. 1. 1. 00. 3. Germany

[strange crater]

Sorry - meant to move that, too. Moved Sandy’s Circus Adventure from Games to the Edutainment and Storybooks category, as those sorts of titles fit better there.

[errant island]

Okay, done.

Just a typo.

Makes sense.

[strange crater]

I also just fixed the two Berenstain Bears titles in Netherlands and Germany - those should also be in Edutainment and Storybooks.

[errant island]

I've sen the beta of Salzburger Land but not the main game on your folder structure : Salzburger Land (Europe) (En,De)

Maybe I've missed it somewhere ?

Should be before Sargon Chess (Europe).

[strange crater]

Yeah, it’s under Multimedia. I’ll move that Beta.

Let me know if you see anything else.

[dawn iris]

Cool, there is a Sargon chess ? Had it on the vic 20 as a module.

Computer plays really well at higher levels.

[errant island]

I used to do DAT files base all these years, not the most sexy part of the preservation job efforts, but proof-reading is important too.

Enough for me for today. Seems consistent now for the non-DVC games collection.

[strange crater]

Thanks. It's good to have somebody else look over these - way too easy to miss something like that, especially with all the foreign language titles.

[dawn iris]

I guess 80% of the cdi lib has to be tested from "real" collectors.

[strange crater]

Yeah, especially with the DVC. Documentation with what does and doesn't require it is all over the place.

I had to manually test much of that, between SAME_CDI and burning discs for a real console.

[errant island]

I'm doing that for a future Switch guide, reading back something like 22 000 entries one by one.
2 months of verification already.

Fun.

[dawn iris]

😱

[errant island]

I don't speak for the DLCs section at a later time.

[stiff flare]

A collector’s guide?

[dawn iris]

I know none who would be so crazy to collect a full set for the switch

[errant island]

An internal list for a preservation group.

[stiff flare]

Ohh ok

[errant island]

I know some of them, half are Japanese.

Like some people collecting all variations from all games on a system.

Revisions, sales, reprints

[dawn iris]

Hmm, that wonder me. cause in Japan is space for living very expensive. And a big collection consume much space.

[errant island]

I do that for Gyakuten Saiban / Ace Attorney personally.

[finite portal]

Some day in 50 years, a group not unlike ours will be having a conversation about how they are trying to. 🤣

[stiff flare]

I know who has a full Switch set

[errant island]

Some people like Fujita-san are crazy and have 3 apartments just for their collection.

[stiff flare]

Holy shit what

[finite portal]

Robby has two houses for his train controller collection

[dawn iris]

i Have allready no space anymore with my 800 games 😂

[errant island]

Fujita-san was almost found dead on March 11, 2011, as one of the collection literally felt on him when he was relaxing.

With the big earthquake back then.

[stiff flare]

Maaaaaaaaan

That’s awful

[errant island]

I plead guilty too.

Densha de Go! and such.

[dawn iris]

Holy shit, kill from your own collection...

[strange crater]

I mean, I can't exactly talk there

I've got I think 36 consoles, 20 computers, and a dozen arcade machines.

[stiff flare]

are you a museum

[strange crater]

Trying to be.

[dawn iris]

I am personally more afraid for an fire. Collection will burns well.

[stiff flare]

Nice!

To the museum thing. Not fire lol

[errant island]

I've lost part of my CD-i collection and other stuff last July.
So yes, you could be afraid.

[stiff flare]

Ah I’m sorry

[errant island]

'C'est la vie.' like French people said.

[dawn iris]

You are alive, thats all what counts !

[errant island]

Yes and my family too.
Electric hazard during the night, the electric meter exploded during the night and my family was rushed to the hospital (intoxicated by fumes).
There will be an investigation and trials that should take 3-5 years...

[finite portal]

I lost all my game cases and boxes to a storage unit fire. The games were with me across the country in CD sleeves.

It sucks.

[stiff flare]

Maaan, sorry to hear.

[dawn iris]

I think i would not start to collect after a fire again. It took me 10 Years to collect now.

[dawn iris]

Thank god, that all is went good. We have such "Rauchmelder" in our house about 12 pieces.

[errant island]

That's also why I'm doing scans and dumps of everything since 30 years.

Fear of losing once more.

[dawn iris]

Right idea. But the modern stuff uses so much capazity.

[errant island]

Working on the field, have my own server racks and data center.

[dawn iris]

About 15 Years ago i build a private dvd server, cause my daughter scratches so many of them. Ended up in a 8TB system...

Just for kids movies.

[errant island]

I'm working with 48*24TB enterprise servers right now.

'Junk' from work.

[dawn iris]

Cool, but i wont to have pay your electric bill.

Problem is you have also to backup them...

[errant island]

3 times around the world at least.

The electric bill is almost none, as I've invested in solar energy and alternative energies 15 years ago.
Just some maintenance, here and there.

Don't do a remake of The Planets of the Apes and it will go okay.

https://tenor.com/view/dr-zaius-olvidala-planet-of-apes-simpsons-gif-13401662

And I understand well the problem of the entropy of the backup supports + the eternal transfer of supports ever X years.

[quasi crystal]

so much blue

[spring gate]

Are you planning on making any/many more changes to this? It is looking great, and I think enough for me to build a compatibility testing sheet for the whole library from.

[strange crater]

I'm going to call this final for the time being:

I will do another check over it for the multimedia & edutainment packs; if I change anything there, I'll post my changes in the thread with an updated version.

[spring gate]

Ace, will get to work over the next few days. The library looks so much less daunting when split up like this, brilliant work

[unreal sparrow]

It is like MSX 😇

[quasi crystal]

https://mister.vampier.net/cdi/

there we go - that's a good start expand on

can someone confirm the SHA1 values of their BIOS files?

I just took the first 2 that I could find

ROM_LOAD( "zx405042p__cdi_slave_2.0__b43t__zzmk9213.mc68hc705c8a_withtestrom.7206", 0x0000, 0x2000, CRC(688cda63) SHA1(56d0acd7caad51c7de703247cd6d842b36173079) BAD_DUMP )

ROMX_LOAD( "cdi200.rom", 0x000000, 0x80000, CRC(40c4e6b9) SHA1(d961de803c89b3d1902d656ceb9ce7c02dccb40a), ROM_BIOS(0) )```

Looks like these are indeed the right dumps...

[quasi crystal]

I looked at the mame source code to find the sha1 values

[fringe marsh]

Well, the work I’m currently doing — tracing out every wire and transistor in the chip and (hopefully) building a gate-level accurate emulator — is possible because someone decap’d the chip, took highly detailed pictures, and shared them.

[spring gate]

Do we know if similar is theoretically possible for the CDi?

[fringe marsh]

I will give an unqualified “sure, why not?”

[quasi crystal]

all converted to chd

[karmic roost]

There is Philips - CD-i (Redump) (CHD) on archive that I found helpful.

[solid quest]

Those SHA1 values match the files I'm using

[young grotto]

https://tenor.com/view/leslie-nielsen-good-luck-pressure-were-all-counting-on-you-gif-11218612

[quasi crystal]

thanks 🙂

[spring gate]

Spotted this in non DVC folder, name implies it requires DVC
Apprentice, The (Europe) (DVC Enhanced).zip 513.1 MB 28/08/2024, 00:35:15

[errant island]

Not required.

But could be enhanced.

There are some other entries like that on the Europe non-DVC set.

[spring gate]

Good point

Guess we will find out in testing 🙂

[valid cairn]

CD .......?

https://tenor.com/view/johnny-depp-pirate-pirate-salute-salute-intergalactic-pirates-of-the-caribbean-gif-13418067761850108708

[strange crater]

DVC Enhanced titles don’t require the DVC, but provide additional functionality when it’s used

The Apprentice, for example, has you choose between music or sound effects without the DVC, but allows for both at the same time with the DVC.

[spring gate]

Ace, good to know

There does seem a rogue subfolder in the Asia games folder

Right, made a start on a compatibility testing sheet, like the one I did for N64. The work you have done Elphine is making what would have been unfeasible into something very managable - brilliant work there

Still needs non games all added, and more on the Info screen, but hopefully a good place to start

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FZLnEOovdDEiX_JmbGvESgzCks_el1L4twahspjt8y8/edit?usp=sharing

Once we have some testing data in there I'll make up the tracking counters

For people who are wanting to get on the CDi Testing Train, this work for everyone? The format worked well for N64 and other smaller consoles we comunity tested

I'm excited, all feeling very real now. Testing N64 was good fun, looking forward to this 🙂

[mild flicker]

Does anyone have a guide on how to install CD-i core ?

[stiff flare]

Awesome, I love your spreadsheets!

[young grotto]

what are the top 5 cdi games?

[spring gate]

Popped Edutainment (non DVC) on there as well now. Anyone who is testing, just request edit access to the sheet and pop your testing on there

[olive kiln]

Rise of the Robots ,Zelda . Ram Raid , Mario Hotel, Mutant Rampage

[errant island]

Top 1 is The Apprentice.

[mild flicker]

I which format do we have to put the games in games folder ?

[sinful hornet]

What's the top 2 non game?

[errant island]

Either CHD or BIN/CUE.

[errant island]

CD-i Tabac and Volvo 460 leather. 😏

[dawn iris]

Look at the pins in this channel

[dawn iris]

Bin alone is gone !

[strange crater]

Time-Life Astrology and Gnomes, imo

[terse flare]

Actually it never worked in the first place for cd images. It has replaced the boot rom code. Do avoid confusion, the latest cores have changed the file ending to .rom.
This is my personal debugging mechanism for uploading custom code to boot. In the end I really have to remove that menu option as probably no user will have the urge to replace the boot rom while the core is running.

[sinful hornet]

This is up there with the Saturn sad clown game as far as covers go

[dawn iris]

I would say, that a cue is needed and a single bin isn´t enough now. (Cue is mostley a textfile to say how to load the bin/bins.)

[spring gate]

OK, will take a break from spreadsheet fun for now, but will add in the Educational, Industrial and other non DVC discs into tabs over the next few days. If people who have tested already are willing to copy their results over to this new sheet that would be much appreciated and again, anyone who is wanting to do some testing just request edit access on the sheet and I'll give access. 🙂

[stiff flare]

That honestly looks like some cover art for an indie grunge band from the 90s

[raw leaf]

Nirvana's first album or something

[spring gate]

Looking through the CDi library someone could make a Best Of The Worst style YouTube channel where titles are randomly selected from the CDi library and a group of people have to go through the ones picked

[undone nimbus]

it looks like a butthole surfers album

most 90s game ads did

[young grotto]

nobody suggested dragons lair?

[strange crater]

Dragon's Lair only runs on DVC systems (and IMO, there are much better versions of that title than the CD-i release)

[young grotto]

is DVC like a CD-I pro ?

[finite portal]

Hmph. Kinda.

[errant island]

MPEG decompression card.

[terse flare]

The Digital Video Cartdrige is a video decompression extension for the CD-i. It is inserted either into the top or the back of the machine. It looks like a metal box and is optional.

[young grotto]

oh that wasn't as standard in cdi? TIL

like the saturn one

i only ever played cdi at school i think

there was a sort of space-golf game?

[dawn iris]

Iirc this was standard in CDI470 (or was it 740 ?) , iirc. But was more like the bundle the module with it. Not build in on the pcb,

[spring gate]

While trawling through the subfolders I found myself in Italian subfolder for Enhanced Music CDs and literally shouted "Fuck yeah!". These two discs alone make the CDi more interesting than many systems, genuinely excited to check these out:

Ennio Morricone - Vidi Aquam id est Benacum (Italy) (En,De,It).zip 452.7 MB 28/08/2024, 10:26:17
Tangerine Dream - Tyranny of Beauty - A Multimedia Presentation (Italy) (En,It).zip 513.7 MB 28/08/2024, 21:58:57

[finite portal]

Magnavox 550 in the US. 450 was without. Huge price difference too.

[finite portal]

IIRC, because it has been a long time, that Tangerine Dream disc gave people difficulty burning successful copies.

Yet another reason this core is so important. ✊

[spring gate]

I'm a big Tangerine Dream fan, really curious to see what tracks are on this and what the enhanced part is.

OK, I have added in all the Karaoke, enhanced Music CD, and retail Educational to the sheet

Thanks Elphive who has started logging test results 🙂

[sly sedge]

Tyranny of Beauty was one of my favorites of theirs. Good album.

Hard to pick favorites though with a discography so massive.

I tend to gravitate more to their Melrose Years and Seattle Years... late '80s to mid '90s.

[finite portal]

The CD-i is kind of at its best when you look at the fascinating multimedia catalog. It has so much more to offer than meme games.

[spring gate]

Oh that's interesting, I don't know Tyranny of Beauty, all my Tangerine Dream is on vinyl and have pretty much everything up until the late 80s - but seems this one came out in 1995 and not on vinyl. Will be cool to hear (and see) this one for the first time when the core is ready 🙂

[pulsar moth]

Unfortunagely the only CD-i game I own is Litil Divil which is DVC. Never played it, no idea if it's any good.

[spring gate]

@strange crater - nothing in this folder here, not sure if there is a disc that should be or a missing .txt?
Philips CD-i5. Industrial Discs (By Region)1. Europe (By Collection)Loek Sanders (Netherlands)

this seems to have a redundant subfolder as well

Philips CD-i5. Industrial Discs (By Region)1. Europe (By Collection)LTV Allemand (France, Language Education)

Well done sticking with these industrial discs, it is painful enough copy and pasting through them all into a spreadsheet, that alone is slowly breaking me

[strange crater]

Thanks - yeah, ignore any subfolders with the sort, but let me know if you find them. It was just discs I extracted during testing to try and figure out what they were.

The Loek Sanders disc doesn’t boot on real hardware - I believe the notes for it said it needed a companion disc on development hardware.

[spring gate]

Cool, I think that's the only ones I have found - everything has been really clean and well organised

Ah, that's the one also at ZZ at the bottom marked not working

Do you have any of these organised packs up on archive now?

Also, can't wait to see what this is... although a shame it is German

Marlboro Adventure Team - Follow Your Dreams (Germany).zip

Looks like a typo in one of these two entries

Personeauto de Theorie (Netherlands) (Disc 1)-missing.txt 0 bytes 04/09/2024, 08:05:17
Personenauto de Theorie (Netherlands) (Disc 2) (Opleiding 3-4).zip

Personeauto or Personenauto?

[strange crater]

The second one

Personenauto - sorry, typing error on the missing entry placeholder there.

[quasi crystal]

personenauto is just a personal vehicle

[strange crater]

It’s a promotional kiosk for an extreme sports & off-roading themed campaign Marlboro did. I haven’t spent too much time looking at it, but they did a whole bunch of weird stuff for it, including a themed Atari Lynx with its own Marlboro Adventure Team video game called Marlboro Go.

[strange crater]

Sounds about right - it’s driver education software.

[quasi crystal]

yeah

for the written test

the Dutch DMV are just a bunch of massive a@#@#

[strange crater]

I mean - I think that’s true of all DMVs, not just the Dutch lol

[strange crater]

In-progress with the games pack - IA upload is very, very slow.

[quasi crystal]

it depends which server you're assigned to

somtimes it's really fast

[strange crater]

It’s a bit more than a third of the way up at the moment.

[quasi crystal]

https://tenor.com/view/viagra-viva-viva-viagra-commercial-ad-gif-22470357

hides in the bushes... bbl

[spring gate]

Nice one, is it basically this folder structure here?

Philips CD-i1. Games (By Region)1. All Systems
[..]
Name Size Modified

1. Europe (A-Z) 29.84 GB 22/09/2024, 20:27:08
2. USA (A-Z) 10.30 GB 22/09/2024, 19:23:45
3. Asia (A-Z) 442.9 MB 11/09/2024, 07:29:09
4. Homebrew & Unlicensed (A-Z) 550.5 MB 05/09/2024, 18:05:55
5. Betas, Demos, & Prototypes (A-Z) 7.92 GB 31/08/2024, 22:55:03

[strange crater]

Yep!

[dawn iris]

Wow, 30gb for Europe, thats much

[spring gate]

This is going to massively helpful for people 🙂

[sinful hornet]

So it was mostly a European system?

[nocturne vortex]

Explains a lot

[spring gate]

Yeah a lot of the ones people will want to play are European exclusives as well

[quasi crystal]

One of the many bad decision of Philips

[slim geode]

It's really hard to play one of these after Arzette 🤣

[pulsar moth]

50 GB or so total is like 80 CDs... not that many actually.

[quasi crystal]

mister is a rom hoarders dream

[young grotto]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-xJUbYNj38

[distant mortar]

Oh this takes me back

[terse flare]

Alright. Last sunday we had some sort of in-between release which allowed to play first games. Afterwards some changes were added during this week to fix some smaller problems

MCD212:   added support for the display control area
          the DCA allows line by line reconfiguration of the display output
CDIC:     fixed data transfer rate to simulate a real CD
          fixes the playback speed of some FMV
SCC68070: fixed timer0 speed by 50% to the expected 15 MHz
          fixes the ingame speed of Zelda Wand of Gamelon
MCD212:   fixed display file decoder during burst misaligned access
          fixes flickering on map of Zelda Wand of Gamelon
Input:    overclock is now optional and available in the menu
          default is off (1200 baud as original paddle)
MCD212:   added coding method "off"
          fixes irritating glitches at the top and bottom of PAL games

[wintry dust]

give'em apple style changelogs: "various fixes and improvements"

[terse flare]

This might be a language barrier. Is this too much info?

[wintry dust]

no, I'm just being anti-user

you're fine!

[errant island]

Perfect.

[dawn iris]

Nice work and progress.

[unreal sparrow]

Tetris have a a lot graphical fixes thank you 🙂
and Zelda's Adventure we can go in game

[terse flare]

To be honest, I haven't yet tried Zelda's Adventure. The background noise reminds me a little bit of the Tetris title screen. At least for Tetris, a different color space is used. The DYUV video mode is not yet supported by the core. It might be possible that these graphics suffer under the same problem

[lavish crow]

Excellent work @terse flare ! When do you plan on tackling audio?

[abstract oyster]

Working great on crt too

[terse flare]

This is very important for me. I test the core simultaneously on my Commodore 1084 and a TFT monitor. I want the video output to be as precise as possible. Luckily Philips was so kind to provide exact timing data on the video signal.

[terse flare]

There is one nasty glitch I'm looking at right now. For some weird reason, every boot starts with glitched graphics. After this is fixed, Audio will be the next topic. At least one type of Audio. The CD-i has multiple audio channels internally.

[lavish crow]

You're making outstanding progress. I'm very grateful that you're working on CD-i

[distant mortar]

Love being able to see the work in almost real time on this

[terse flare]

I'm still surprised that it works so well. This machine really comes to life right now.

[nocturne vortex]

Thank you sir, I pretty much only use CRTs with mister so you rule

[terse flare]

I know what you mean. I had this feeling during the development of the N64 core. Every day Robert has surprised us with new functionality. It was a wild time. I'm not as insane and fast as Robert but there is still some progress, I guess.

[abstract oyster]

Well, you get one bootable game before christmas too I guess

[spring gate]

Brilliant work Slamy!

[unreal sparrow]

this background issue is present on some games. I could provide name on which I see it if needed 🙂

[spring gate]

For people testing, please get involved in logging results in the compatibility sheet. Would be great to get a little gang here checking and updating, and get the games all checked to see if they boot and get into play. 🙂
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FZLnEOovdDEiX_JmbGvESgzCks_el1L4twahspjt8y8/edit?gid=186988875#gid=186988875

Just request edit access on the sheet and I can give access right away

For anyone using this method of switching to Slamy's Main, do you literally just copy and paste this at the bottom of your .ini or do you need to format it in some way?

Add this to your MiSTer.ini
[CD-i]
main=MiSTer_CDi
Rename Slamy's MiSTer to MiSTer_CDi

[quasi crystal]

security improvements

@spring gate want me to do the same to the info page as I did to the n64 core?

[spring gate]

Feel free, be good to get the BIOS info and how to do this MiSTer Main switch trick explained, will make testing for people much easier

[young grotto]

is there a patreon btw?

[terse flare]

Difficult. I haven't created one yet. I have a little bit of "inferiority complex". But if you WANT me to create one, I can create one. There is a thought in my mind for a week now to maybe reduce my working days from 5 to 4 on my full time job to be a little bit more involved in this project. I think others here do that too but I'm not sure. I think Robert als worked for 4 days to support the core, the family and the full time job at the same time.

[young grotto]

don't do it unless you're super comfortable with the idea, it's not for everyone i've seen it ruin some good devs tbh

[terse flare]

As opposed to others I've written the change log just here. Robert has made some posts on Patreon, I'm aware as I've subscribed when he had Patreon still open. Sometimes I would like to spend more time on the core. I have a certain feeling that this would move this from a hobby to something semiprofessional. People could really have expectations after paying money. Right now I don't owe anyone anything.

[young grotto]

kofi is an alternative i think? it's one off donations more like "here if you want to say thanks and buy me a beer"

i don't think Robert* was making so much off patreon he could drop a day from work, he's just always had a 4 day week i think, unrelated

[terse flare]

He had about 1000 subs on Patreon if I remember correctly😅

[young grotto]

yeah but i assume, maybe incorrectly idk, that he is at least as good at his professional job as he is at making fun toys for us

so he gets paid an eyewatering amount

and cdi isn't going to pull in psx or n64 money, sorry

[terse flare]

I never would have even expected that. I think for that you need to tackle the other 2 consoles which shall not be named here xD

[dawn iris]

You mean Amiga CD32 ? 😉

[terse flare]

No, the CDTV. I'm still slightly angry at my dad for selling it when I was a small boi

[merry oyster]

Aww yeah, new core update!

[dawn iris]

Yeah, i can imagine that. Crazy time when i think about 18 years back. Amiga prices increases factor 10...

[merry oyster]

Nice, Namco Arcade Classics boots now!

Get in here @viral pine and play some more CD-i!

[errant island]

No dice with the Apprentice so far.

[merry oyster]

Yeah, nothing past that logo animation still.

[terse flare]

The CD parts are in general very limited right now. Maybe this game actually has the audacity to ask for something the core doesn't provide. The table of contents for example...

The only command the CDIC supports right now is reading MODE2 and MODE1 sectors from a known timestamp. And that alone seems to be enough for most games as it seems

[merry oyster]

I can get Pac-Panic to load now. I couldn't on the previous core, but I think others were able to at that time?

Burn Cycle loads to the title screen, but it's super corrupted.

[finite portal]

The Apprentice is a multi bin image. Burning it to work on real hardware is tricky too due to the disc structure. Not sure if that contributes to it not working yet.

[viral pine]

Fancy

I have a second preview vid Sunday

[stiff flare]

Pinned latest build, thanks for all your hard work @terse flare !

[merry oyster]

We actually have an official CD-i emoji. What a world we live in!

[stiff flare]

Yeah, kinda hard to do since the CD-i logo is so wide. If you’ve got something better I’m happy to replace it, just let me know!

[merry oyster]

That logo is as wide as the console's audience!

All dozen of us!

[nocturne vortex]

I assume when I go to mess with this on the weekend there is some obvious archive put up on some organizations site I can find that will have all my legal backups of my CD-i games I keep in storage? And it doesn’t matter which I grab format-wise?

[merry oyster]

CHD works great, but bin/cue is fine.

[nocturne vortex]

Danke, will grab whatever comes first

[merry oyster]

is the closest we'll ever get to a 3DO emoji...

[stiff osprey]

haha yeah we'll pretend there is no 3DO logo

[spring gate]

There will be a nice organised pack of the non DVC games coming soon to your favourite archive site very soon (not my doing, this will be brilliant for playing/testing the core though, can't wait)

[terse flare]

If there was ever a Gex game on CD-i it would have FMV like this
https://youtu.be/V0adoiAjyzw

[lavish crow]

Thanks for all your work on the compatibility lists! I know you're also part of Gaming Alexandria. Any chance to get them or other preservation groups to look into the few undumped CD-i games?

Urban Murderfiles seems to be the only undumped game (obv other undumped software, but would be great to have the final game dumped)

[stiff flare]

You’re part of gaming Alexandria?

[lavish crow]

I mispoke. I just know he's on their Discord as am I

[stiff flare]

That’s canon now

[spring gate]

Oh, I'm only part of Gaming Alexandria in the sense that I hang about the Discord really, am a bit of a cheerleader for them and bother Hubz periodically. :-).

But lets see what they say about CDi undumped hunting, they may know groups that are into doing that

[stiff flare]

Hubz confirmed

[spring gate]

https://preserve-cdi.blogspot.com/

[lavish crow]

Thanks for reaching out. Just saw your post on Gaming Alexandria. Sometimes a project like MiSTer can really motivate people to search for the final undumped games for a project. For example Dragon's Lair on Jaguar was undumped for the longest until Rich Whitehouse's emulator

[errant island]

Something already checked with internal Redump team.

Some of them were already talked also with KailoKyra and Omegalfa back then.
But the remaining are really expensive or/and really rare.

[spring gate]

As an aside I found an undumped VTech Socratese cart for under $20 if anyone in the US is interested in grabbing it and getting it to someone who could dump it. I think it is the only undumped cart.

[lavish crow]

Sweet! What kind of software is it?

[spring gate]

Educational Cart that came with some tablet peripheral.

No idea if it works without the tablet, but is weird that it hasn't been dumped and there is one sitting there so cheap

[lavish crow]

Def reach out to Gaming Alexandria about it

[spring gate]

DId already a couple of times but nobody seemed interest in grabbing it

[lavish crow]

I have no idea how to dump games lol

Wish I could help

[spring gate]

Be great to find whoever can dump them and let them know, or get it to them, no idea who did the others though

[errant island]

KailoKyra did some of them.

[spring gate]

Oh, are you in touch with them?

[errant island]

I was years ago.

I worked also on the set, but lost everything during the house fire last July.

[spring gate]

Damn, that's rough

Let's take this to the Socratese channel, I'm guilty of derailing this chat

Right, time to see if this trick of adding the line to the end of my .ini works for booting to alt MiSTer main to load CDi games having copies a load of random discs over to my SD... wish me luck

[errant island]

For the JPN missing titles, they are from a private preservation group and also a private collector.

They will not help on finishing the set, only sharing hashes and entries, but no dump at all.
Different mentality and different copyright laws.

[spring gate]

That's a real shame

[errant island]

And those titles are not only expensive, you can't find them anymore on second hands shops.

Like when I searched for Little Big Adventure on PC-98 / Fm Towns.

25 years personal search.

[spring gate]

Did you ever find it?

[errant island]

Only one time on an Yahoo Auctions in 2013.

But lost it for 540 000 yens.

We were talking on about 5 000 dollars back then.

I don't have that money for a single game.

[spring gate]

Damn, that's rough

[errant island]

Even the original devs at Fujitsu don't have it anymore.

Adeline Soft in France passes them down a partial source code from their first 3D render engine and they ported it to the PC98/Fm Towns machines.

That's also why the JPN and EUR versions of that game on PS1 are different.

The JPN version was done on a WIP version sent from the original French team, but they have lost everything on Fujitsu's side.

I wanted to find that version for personal reasons and one of my 'Holy Grails'.

[spring gate]

That's a real shame that one is still lost

[errant island]

Sad story, once more.

Cyo, from Redump tried to find it too since years.

[spring gate]

Have done a quick bit of testing on the new core of some random non game discs. Some exciting news is Photo CDs actually boot! The images are garbled so you have no idea what you are looking at but you get the discs' bespoke menus and can navigate about them.

That is the menu for GITS

I tried a BMB Karaoke discs and is seemed to be doing something but was all garbled

You can move the musical note cursor around

I tried a commercial tourist board disc about Nijmegen but it didn't seem to load, was very garbled

The Morricone and Tangerine Dream enhanced music discs didn't load/garbled

However the Edutainment Cartoon Jukebox disc did load and from the menu which looked OK was able to hit play but after a couple of seconds for this screen

Maybe a timing issue there?

Will log these on the sheet a bit later

Very excited that Photo CDs are seemingly playable though, even if the pictures are a mess, that opens up a whole weird little world if those can be made to run properly 🙂

-I grabbed some discs from the photo CD redump pack on archive incidentally for anyone else who is curious

[bronze umbra]

yeah, unfortunately the baseline attitude in many Japanese gaming communities is aggressively anti-preservation. it results in a lot of stuff becoming lost really unnecessarily.

[spring gate]

I do find it rather odd, I get they have strict laws about piracy, but is anyone in Japan going to get into trouble for uploading or downloading a CDi disc in 2024? Serious question there, I don't know, but I would hope not.

[bronze umbra]

it's very much a cultural standard thing more than anything. Japan had extremely lax copyright laws in the mid-20th century and aggressively tightened them specifically under pressure from the US. when they did, they leaned much more into specifically what are called moral rights of creators and minor indirect usage (stuff covered in the US by fair use, which does not exist in Japan.)

there's a baseline assumption that any decision by the creator of a work (including making a historically important work unavailable, or refusing to allow even the name of their work or product to be mentioned in another work) is legitimate in a way that has basically never existed in the US.

(but conversely general guidelines on fan works that haven't specifically been asked to shut down by copyright owners are dramatically more lax than in the Anglosphere.)

[raw leaf]

How ironic, the only Dutch console channel and the topic is Japan

[gleaming echo]

Flashback now boots to language selection but has no input detection

[gleaming echo]

Dark Castle boots but then hangs at level selection screen after picking the open door but it all looks correct

The torches are still flaming so it is not completely frozen

[spring gate]

You able to log your findings on the testing sheet Fuzz?

[gleaming echo]

sure 🙂

[spring gate]

Ace, thanks mate 🙂

Just request access if you don't have it already

[gleaming echo]

requested buddy

[spring gate]

Done 🙂

[gleaming echo]

That is all I have really tested so far tonight

Thank you for access, I will add all my findings to it 🙂

[spring gate]

Every little helps!

Will hopefully have game pack downloaded and on my SD within the next few days. Sloooowww process being able to do that this end.

[gleaming echo]

I know what you mean, I am slowly getting the USA pack

Unless the game doesn't have a USA release then I will get euro version

[spring gate]

On the plus side, the non DVC games tabs are very manageable, so hopefully between us all we can community test the library quickly.
Europe: 88 games
North America: 50 games
Asia: 5 games

[gray badge]

is redump the most up-to-date set?

[spring gate]

Yeah

There will be an organised set of just the non DVC games from redump up very soon, maybe even within the next day

[gray badge]

oh hmmm

[gleaming echo]

I still hope that DVC gets implemented at some point so games like The 7th Guest will be playable and also the Dragons Lair games

[spring gate]

Fingers crossed, but basically consider that a different system. Think of it a bit like 32x to the Mega Drive.

[gleaming echo]

Yeah I guess I wonder how much of the FPGA is currently in use

File size is still half of PSX/Saturn/N64 but doesn't mean much 🙂

[spring gate]

Do any CDi emulators support DVC?

[gleaming echo]

I don't know, last I looked there wasn't many CDi emulators at all

CD-i Emulator
This emulator by CD-i Fan is currently closed-source donationware, with vague plans to move to open-core at a future date.[2] The public beta releases unfortunately handle free trial timing in a way that makes them unusable (without cracking, anyway) after set calendar dates; for the latest beta, 0.5.3 beta 7, this will be at 2025/01/01. The current betas do have proof-of-concept DVC emulation, although compatibility may still be an issue.[3] Despite the long time between releases, this emulator is still in active development as of April 2023, with work being done on the next version (likely called 0.6) that reportedly supports most of the DVC games and also has several other improvements.[4]

[spring gate]

Jesus Christ, someone put a kill date into an emulator?

That is rum.

[gleaming echo]

unless you pay for it or crack it

but it has preliminary DVC emulation so hope is there 🙂

[nocturne vortex]

What about the Burger King training video?

I kicked off my redump download it’s going to be a while before I can try it myself

[gleaming echo]

I assume that will require DVC

[nocturne vortex]

Damn. Fingers crossed that can be figured out then

I’ll have to tide myself over rewatching the training video for the meat station of old country buffet on YouTube

[gleaming echo]

I hope it will but we need compatibility to increase, the rest of the video modes so everything renders properly and then after that audio needs implementing to make the games more playable and then depending on FPGA space depends on DVC I guess

[errant island]

I remember KailoKyra dumping the disc back then.

The disc coming from the HomeComputerMuseum in Helmond (Netherlands).

[gleaming echo]

That is cool, I wanna visit that place next time I am in the Netherlands

[lavish crow]

DVC sounds like the TLB situation for N64. Lots of games require it and it’ll be revisited by the end of development

[errant island]

EDIT : I forgot to remove the GMEGA ROM inside the emulator.
It freezes when starting the disc without it, so DVC.

[gleaming echo]

Oooo very nice

[errant island]

It freezes after inputting a name with a DVC ROM.

I don't have my original system here.

[gleaming echo]

I would love to find an original system for helping to test but where I live I will be very lucky if I can find one

[errant island]

I've made a mistake and forgot to remove the last MPEG card ROM file, sorry.

[gleaming echo]

No problem 🙂

[errant island]

So, it needs the DVC for launching the title.

[gleaming echo]

I need to sleep now, good night all 🙂

[errant island]

GN, same, I've stayed for too long.

[lavish crow]

Is there a 2nd Disc for The 7th Guest? It's weird how it's listed as:
7th Guest, The (USA) (Disc 1) (The Game).bin
7th Guest, The (USA) (Disc 1) (The Game).cue

[young grotto]

i've seen a few like that my assumption is there was some kind of companion disc (Not The Game) that wasn't deemed worth ripping?

[lavish crow]

Yup. Just investigated it. It appears that the 2nd disc is a soundtrack. Here's a snippet from the game manual:

[errant island]

Soundtrack of the game, indeed.

[terse flare]

The github project has the FPGA utilization. I wanted to keep track of that, so I've added that to the README.md at the start of the project . Usually I refresh it on the last commit just before I make a release here.

Logic utilization (in ALMs)    12,024 / 41,910 ( 29 % )
Total block memory bits        632,004 / 5,662,720 ( 11 % )
Total DSP Blocks               47 / 112 ( 42 % )

The biggest chunk according to Quartus is the main CPU.
Nevertheless, as you can see, we still have lots of headroom. I would not have started all of this if there was a chance I would be running into the same problems the N64 core had run into during its final phase. If you look at the statistics, the MiSTer framework has a rather big portition of the FPGA and I'm sometimes afraid that the already tightly fitting N64 core will suffer under further extensions in case more features are added.

[gleaming echo]

looking good Slamy 🙂 hopefully there is space left for DVC at the end of development

[pale ivy]

I am super excited about DVC

[gleaming echo]

so am I, I really hope it can be implemented 🙂

[opaque temple]

have any good guides on creating a PhotoCD?

[raw leaf]

Back in the 90s there were special displays/tables in camera shops where you could hand in a film roll and order a photo cd. Try there

[spring gate]

I haven't dug into making your own photo CDs. I don't know if any disc authoring software let's you build and burn them, presumably some do. Crude discs were basically a folder of images on a CD, while more interesting were a bit like accessing a DVD menu structure.

[lavish crow]

Hey @spring gate Am checking the dumped games and it appears that Disc 2 of Thunder in Paradise is missing. Disc 2 contains an episode of Thunder in Paradise, while Disc 1 is the game

FYI, Disc 2 of The 7th Guest is missing, but that is just an audio CD of the game

[spring gate]

Is this in the redump pack?

[lavish crow]

The one linked in your compatibility sheet? Then yes

[spring gate]

Ah, the cut down link may not have all been uploaded when you downloaded it

I jumped the gun putting the pack link as it was still being uploaded

If it is the full redump link though then that should have everything

But doesn't thunder in paradise need DVC?

[lavish crow]

Yes, but just prepping my collection 🙂

The set I'm looking at has 2212 files

Updated 2024-08-04

[spring gate]

Yeah that is the newest redump

[lavish crow]

Thanks for clarifying. Just want to note that Thunder in Paradise Disc 2 and The 7th Guest Disc 1 are missing.
The 7th Guest Disc 2 is just a soundtrack so while it'd be nice to have, it's not necessary.
Thunder in Paradise Disc 2 is a Video CD of the series finale of the show, so would be cool to have

[gleaming echo]

I think DVC stuff should not be a priority download unless you have the space to store them on the off chance DVC gets implemented

[sinful hornet]

@spring gate I just requested edit access

[spring gate]

Ah OK, so bonus discs of non game content. They may well be dumped but in a different pack. I would bring these missing discs up on the gaming Alexandria chat we were having @lavish crow those chaps may be able to help

[spring gate]

Done, and thanks. 🙂

[sinful hornet]

thank you!

[spring gate]

Hope to be seeing a few more requests for edit access come in...

[gleaming echo]

@spring gate can you copy paste all the stuff I added for sesame street letters down to numbers as well, I am at work and was just informed that it works the same as well

[spring gate]

On my phone in the garden right now I am afraid, can anyone else here sort this?

[gleaming echo]

No problem, if no one can before I get home tomorrow I will do it

[errant island]

Video CD Redump pack.

[lavish crow]

Thanks for clarifying!

[errant island]

Germany and France have only one disc, just the game.

And French name is : Caraïbes Offshore.

[spring gate]

Just realised I missed all the European regional exclusives off my sheet, I will add those when I am back as at the house this weekend. I think I will also add a tab for the redump photo CD pack as well.

[errant island]

There was some discussion as some point about separating the Photo CD and Video CD sets.
As they are transversal between multiple systems, like the Saturn and the CD-i.

I've not splitted those sets on my personal archives yet.

I will need to see the complete reorganized set from Elphive before, will be faster than redoing it on my side.
And if necessary, just doing some supplements on it where it is missing something.

[spring gate]

The redump Photo CD set is its own set separate from CDi or any other pack. It only has just over 200 discs in it though so it isn't very comprehensive

Is a shame there doesn't seem to be a big push to get more dumped and archived.

[errant island]

Rare and expensive.

And a system without any very valuable interest for most people, we don't need to hide it.

[spring gate]

Not really, looking on auction sites there are really cheap ones that are undumped when I have looked before

[errant island]

In Japan ?

[spring gate]

The one thing I am surprised there isn't a redump for is CD+G

Would be good to get even one disc in bin/cue format for testing if nothing else

[errant island]

CD+G is/was in discussion on how to preserve them when I took my retirement.

claunia was working on it as it is not just as simple as it seems for correct preservation of the filesystems and subtracks infos.

We generally don't shoot in the dark anymore after all those years of experience.
Doing it, but doing it one time and the correct way.

Don't redo the whole PS1, Saturn, SEGA CD and more importantly the PC Engine CD-ROM² situations from the past.

[nocturne vortex]

Redump download still going after running all night, geesh

[errant island]

Patience, my friend.
(Taking off for today, good luck everyone here.)

[wintry dust]

yeah, CD+G is annoying. it's typically a 3rd file, although I guess there's no reason you can't just append the data to individual sectors like chd does

but that would break like every piece of software that reads bin/cue

[unreal sparrow]

I don't know if someone test this case but when we end game like "Zelda - The Wand of Gamelon" it doesn't return on the bios it hangs before to show again the bios.

[gleaming echo]

I kinda noticed this last night but you just reload the core and everything is fine

[unreal sparrow]

yeah !

[strange crater]

I haven’t tried the new core yet, but this happened a lot for me with the previous one. About every other game I’d test would do this.

[gleaming echo]

It will get fixed over time

The fact commercial games are even booting at this early stage is insane

[gray badge]

I'm downloading the set now. assuming the archive is kind, I should be able to help test soon

[spring gate]

Yeah I had some weird issues when I was loading through a few games last night, after a few I got stuck on a black screen and couldn't boot back to the BIOS screen and had to reboot the MiSTer. Some gremlins in there but early days yet. As has been said, is incredible things are loadings at all at this stage.

[terse flare]

This is a problem I don't yet fully understand myself. Switching from NTSC to PAL and vice versa is also a problem. It seems the reset behavior is not really stable right now. There are probably multiple issues right now which turn up in reality but are not visible in simulation directly. There is at least one known issue for me since yesterday. The DCA is fighting my old Nemesis after bootup: the "burst wrap" This results into random code execution of the videochip during bootup. It might lead to problems everytime the core boots but turns out fine most of the time. This is noted but right now I think more about the audio parts.

[spring gate]

Should the one recommended BIOS work for both NTSC and PAL?

[terse flare]

Yes. The bios has multiple bootup logos for the two regions. It supports PAL and NTSC. In fact, you can resolder a real CDi 210 to be the other region.

[spring gate]

That should make things simpler

Actually someone mentioned that there is one game that only works in PAL, let me find the info...

"I do know offhand Making the Grade only works on PAL CDi units, making it one of the few region-locked titles, so that may be something specific to test"

[lunar nexus]

Stupid question, got the correct roms, got the latest rbf, and yet despite trying all the ones others have working, I just get a sky blue screen after clicking on "play" after the bios has booted. Doesn't matter if it's a chd, or cue iso. Any ideas? (me get's ready to be told something so obvious, so I'll start to feel embarrassed now!) Thanks folks.

[terse flare]

@lunar nexus You need to have a special MiSTer main. It is pinned

[terse flare]

There are also suggestions to not replace your original main but instead add something in your ini file. I haven't tried that yet though as I'm sitting at the source and I don't know what happens when I do this together with the USB blaster

[dawn iris]

The ini works well and tell to use the other main for the cdi core only.

[lunar nexus]

Thanks for replying. I did add the extra bit to the ini, but it said something like it didn't understand it. I'll try it again. Thanks.

[dawn iris]

Have you renamend the main as in the ini ?

[lunar nexus]

Right, it helps when you cut and paste correctly, picked a game at random Hanna Barbaras Cartoon Festival, boots fine, doesn't do anything when you pick a cartoon though. But wow!!!!!!!! Thanks @terse flare That's my night sorted!! I don't understand what that "main" bit does, but this is clever stuff!!

@spring gate Is it yourself thats done the spreadsheet? I've just requested edit access. Thanks.

[lunar nexus]

All sorted, can't cut and paste properly, thanks!

[dawn iris]

Ok, so perhaps better if @terse flare put next main directly in the right name for the pinned ini.

[spring gate]

That is you sorted now

[lunar nexus]

JUst updated my first, thanks @spring gate

[spring gate]

Brilliant, many hands make light work, hopefully we can get all the non DVC games load tested over the next few days 🙂

[lunar nexus]

@terse flare I don't know how long you've worked on this before putting it on github, but a few months graft, this is great stuff. Many thanks.

[gleaming echo]

I got like a week off work next week so I should be able to do some mass testing of anything that hasn't been tested 🙂

[terse flare]

I've worked for a month on it before putting it on github. Development started on 5th of June under the hood. A person wanted to participate so I've uploaded everything to avoid having two CD-i cores. In the end I'm still alone at the core... well everyone can join. But maybe the code base is frightening.

[spring gate]

What is next on the list to look at Slamy?

[terse flare]

Do you mean what I'm looking at? I originally intended to fix a problem with the Display Control Area. It causes the bootup screen which is normally blue to totally flip out. I hope this only causes visual problems right now, but I'm not 100% sure as the outcome depends on previous values in the SDRAM. But in the end I decided to push that one point back.
I'm currently working on XA audio. It will take some time though as I first needed to collect some info on how other cores did it. The PS1 also used XA. In the end I need to check what code I need to copy. For now, it is "green book time"

[spring gate]

Oh nice, should this enable audio in a lot/all titles? Does CDi have multiple audio formats that you need to support?

[terse flare]

There is XA and CDDA for non DVC games. Most games use XA. I only know of "The Apprentice" which uses CDDA. But with XA there are multiple variations. There is 4 bit, 8 bit, mono, stereo

Because XA has the bigger impact I will start with that as it makes the most benefit. It is also a little bit more difficult but the architecture of my CDIC implementation has to fit it in the end. Adding CDDA should be easier... I think

[quartz crest]

So similar to psx

[terse flare]

It is equal I think. Even the filter coefficients of the CD-i emulation in MAME is the same as the one in the PSX core.

[unreal sparrow]

Sony, Philips and Nintendo work together at this time so information was share and used

[terse flare]

XA also made lots of sense as it allowed interleaving data (and video) and audio. This is integral to anything the CD-i stands for

[spring gate]

-I have added in a tab for the non DVC European games that are regional exclusives on the testing sheet, missed that when making it, so that's another 68 titles

[spring gate]

A tab on the end for the Redump Kodak Photo CD set as well now

[spring gate]

Every tab should have a counter now as well. I will do some extra conditional formatting at some point, but that should be more than enough to test with for now. If anyone spots anything missing or off with the sheet then let me know

[sinful hornet]

Only tested like 5 so far and 3 of them at least boot so I'd call that a great start to the core!

[spring gate]

I am still stunned anything boots at this stage, let alone be playable, its incredible progress

[sinful hornet]

The great period of "well this is technically playable" 😆

[spring gate]

Have you logged your findings on the testing sheet?

[sinful hornet]

Yeah, usa sheet started at the top

[spring gate]

Nice one

[lunar nexus]

OMG, Defender of the Crown, boots fine, no graphics problems, totally playable!

[undone nimbus]

same, weird as it may sound i bought a mister partially for eventual cd i (and jaguar) support

i dont want to play metroid and donkey kong country. i want to play the joy of sex and othello with einstein

[lunar nexus]

@spring gate Just a quick question with the spreadsheet, I'm using 270924 build, if there's an entry by someone else, using an older build, do I overwrite what they found? Or tag it onto the end of their post, eg "playable in 270924 build" or words to that effect?

[spring gate]

Overwrite an older entry, with your newer testing details, but be sure to confirm/check what was in the notes

[lunar nexus]

okay, thanks!

[lavish crow]

https://tenor.com/view/hotel-mario-all-toasters-toast-toast-gif-24380545

Yes. As much as I love the classics I’ve played them to death. I’m hyped about Hotel Mario!

[sinful hornet]

This Inca game looks so tight

I saw an Inca man's face change into a skull then into a 3d pan flute and fly into space

[stiff flare]

Dude YES

[valid cairn]

I like to believe that, maybe, when the end finally comes, my head will also turn into a space flute and strike out to explore the universe.

[stiff flare]

lol wat

[sinful hornet]

https://youtu.be/WnU_2yewnVs?si=epw5Q3elHJ30Xd4A

Also, this may have the worst font I've ever seen

[spring gate]

Great work testing thoseposers!

Does anyone know if any of the non DVC games make use of any peripherals not yet supported, like a lightgun, keyboard etc. ?

[quartz crest]

That's a 2 year old video

[spring gate]

-not sure if meant for me, but was talking about thoseposer's progress on the testing sheet

[quartz crest]

Ah cool! Was wondering haha

[glacial herald]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Deqzy_tifRU

[sinful hornet]

Oh wow they played it?

I watched them all the time and somehow missed that

[glacial herald]

They had a whole cd-i only show. One of my favorites
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NkD2Nq2pRjM&pp=ygUNZ2lhbnRib21iIGNkaQ%3D%3D

[gray badge]

man I miss that crew

[sinful hornet]

Will definitely watch that

[glacial herald]

Dang that stream is almost exactly 10 years old 🥲

[gray badge]

nothing will beat the christmas stream where dan and jason had to guess a number

just one of the wildest, unstaged, things I have ever seen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdtbotWl4T8

I looked forward to their holiday shit all year

its probably one of those things where you have to know their personalities to really appreciate it. but it was wild

[glacial herald]

Oh yeah, was such a cool thing to hang out with - first podcast I ever listened to back in '09, and quicklooks were revolutionary. Still follow Nextlander and Jeff

[gray badge]

same

[sinful hornet]

Finished going through the USA games and seems like a great start for the core 👍

[spring gate]

You about hero, well done doing all of those!

[sinful hornet]

I'm just using my eyes, Slamy is the one using their brains 😅

[gray badge]

really nice work

[lunar nexus]

I was going to ask how to do the perfect, I guess we can't, unless you complete a game, but that's not important right now.

[gleaming echo]

Perfect is when it is indistinguishable from real hardware, nothing can reach that right now because we do not have audio

[modern mirage]

I thought we learnt from the PSX that playable, complete and perfect were a bad idea. People were using the playable count as an example that the core was bad becasue they were rarely moved into perfect

seems the same issue will occur again

[gleaming echo]

Probably, I like completable as it shows you can complete the game with no major bugs

But perfect I agree should not be a thing

[modern mirage]

I do remember posts where people were using the perfect count to slam the PSX core

msotly on reddit and not here

[gleaming echo]

Well isn't that just reddit in a nutshell?

[modern mirage]

well yes

but sadly people get info from there and then use it for misinformation

[gleaming echo]

True

[modern mirage]

Even completable is hard to define, does that mean you can limp through the game and complete it or that you can complete every sub quest etc

or is that defined as perfect

[gleaming echo]

Completable is as you say everything can be completed with no major bugs, perfect is as I said no difference between the core and real hardware

[lunar nexus]

Went through all the photo disks overnight, all seem to boot, in "game" where you can select things, but the graphics are so distored you're not seeing photos. You're generally seeing a black and white screen, with severely distorts photos that you can almost make out. Build 27/09/24. Best concentrate on "more gamey" titles I think for now.

Knackered now, but the jist is, as far as I can remember, all of the kodak seems to boot, and be controllable, but images are in black and white and so distorted making it not really any point to them...yet @spring gate I've only stuck the top 4 on the photos part of the spreadsheet. Leaving this for now, trying "proper" titles today.

Thanks for the tips above guys, I'll stick to "playable", even though I played Defender of the crown for an hour last night, if we had sound, if I could complete it, that would be the sort of candidate as "perfect" I presume.

It's 9.01am ok time, going for a few hours sleep!!

[gleaming echo]

That would be completable unless there is literally no difference between the core and the hardware, get some good sleep though buddy

[young grotto]

can you make custom photo discs? could potentially help to debug if you basically have some test patterns

the perfect thing is tricky right? like who has the time to even prove one game is literally perfect? its borderline impossible. Maybe at some point you just move things to "presumed perfect" and then start knocking things back down to completable if you find minor issues

[valid onyx]

Just noticed this gem in the list of CD-i roms: 'Diamant Frituurtest' - aka: a deep frying test of the deep-frying oil producer 'Diamant'

Not sure if I can get to it today, but DEFFO gonna give that a spin

[modern mirage]

if you enjoy that there is one from Dulux. Its called Watching paint dry

[undone nimbus]

surely this comes with a deep fryer peripheral that plugs into the back of the cd i?

i remember "multimedia" being such a buzzword back then, i still dont know what it means exactly beyond "your computer can play video"

[modern mirage]

it means disapointment. Throwing videos at things was a dead end. Still the core is a piece of History

[strange crater]

The Games section from my sheet & moondandy’s should now be available on IA. Look for “Philips CD-i - No-DVC Testing Pack (Games)”.

[gray badge]

is this the link to the you know where on sheet?

[spring gate]

It is indeed

[gray badge]

ok perfect

is it helpful to try and start completing games? or are we just looking for "playable" at this stage?

[spring gate]

That pack Elphive has mentioned has all the non DVD games organised into folders that are matched on the testing sheet. In short, if you are after a curated and organised pack of all the games then go to that pack and get downloading. This is not a drill, all stations are a go. 🙂

[valid cairn]

Thanks for doing that! Appreciate it greatly

[spring gate]

I think at this stage getting every game in the pack load tested would be very beneficial, it probably isn't as useful completing through games that have clear issues with them until textures etc. are all implemented - unless of course you really want to complete them

[modern mirage]

completing a game is pointless since they have no sound and so you cant prove they are functioning correctly

[gray badge]

ahh ok. i haven't loaded any so I wasn't sure what state they were in

[spring gate]

Yeah it looked like from my skimming through all Photo CDs have the same issue, that they boot OK but the images are garbled monochrome. Hopefully as more fixes come in for textures in games then these also start to work, or maybe there is something bespoke that needs added/fixed for the Photo CD image format

Thanks for checking as well, nice to know I am not on an island of one checking to see if these weird format discs actually work. I am copying over the full redump of them currently and will keep an eye out as new builds come in

For people grabbing the new pack, both Asia and Homebrew only have 5 untested games each, so those tabs would be quick to check

[gray badge]

can we find the bios files in the usual place? or is there a specific set we need? (I saw the names in the pinned messages, but unsure if that is a specific set or not)

[spring gate]

Yeah, the files you can find on archive, the ones you want are listed in the GitHub readme

[terse flare]

This is only a very small update. I wanted to work on XA audio but the boot screen not being blue was a fruit, a little bit lower hanging. I had hopes high this would also fix the reset behavior. But no, it was only a glitch in the visuals. I have to admit that the core is unstable after Reset. The person which wants to play with it should always reload the core in this state of the project.

Whatever I did, it killed booting up in NTSC. I mostly test in PAL so I haven't catched that. So this might be the first time we have a big regression. But I guess that happens to the best of us.

[unreal sparrow]

Hotel Mario still boots on NTSC mode

[sinful hornet]

I tried Flintstones and Faces of Evil, both usa, and they're both still working it seems

So maybe a case by case thing

It did take Flintstones a bit to get to the Philips disc load animation

Never mind, I get what you mean now. Setting tv mode to ntsc and restarting the core isn't working.

But you can still play usa games in pal mode same as before

[strange crater]

Yeah - the system is region-free, so games from any region will generally work on any model. The issue is the TV Mode selector in the OSD menu.

[unreal sparrow]

On Lemmings, the start menu is not quit visible but we can see it a little and after selecting two times we go in game with a green cross target used to select lemming.

[bright zinc]

I was getting rolling on crt with the previous build, I thought tv mode selector was already broken 😄

oh I'm in ntsc land

[nocturne vortex]

how do you run a game? insert disc alone, or insert disc and then hit reset or reset and close OSD?

[strange crater]

Insert game, reset, hit Play Disc when the screen appears.

[nocturne vortex]

and if I get a teal screen maybe I grabbed wrong bios or something?

(after hitting play)

[strange crater]

Check the pinned comments. Make sure you have the correct MiSTer binary which accepts CD-i format discs.

[nocturne vortex]

yeah lastest of those and the ini changes are there

and named the same of course

[strange crater]

You have this file in the root of your SD card, and named it MiSTer_CDi?

#1103404843512631357 message

[terse flare]

A reset is not required. Just insert the disc and press play. The reset seems to be broken. There has to be a bug somewhere.

[strange crater]

Nevermind, Slamy's right - I had some issues where resetting helped on the wandofgamelon core. Newer versions don't seem to require it for those games

[nocturne vortex]

Weird I rebooted a couple times and now it works. I got stuck in PAL mode after saving NTSC but deleted my cfg and switching to NTSC it still rolled. Rebooted a couple times and now it’s working fine and I could switch to NTSC. All good now

[strange crater]

Correcting myself again here - Jan Pienkowski Haunted House still requires a reset to boot correctly for me on 20240929; it just hits a black screen otherwise. (I'll add that to a note on the testing document.) Everything else seems to just boot now.

[viral pine]

lol you and Robert are gonna kill ke with these dueling releases

[strange crater]

While I'm looking at Haunted House, it does look like one of the recent releases fixed the sprite flickering issues I noticed in the wandofgamelon release. The animations seem to run just about perfectly now.

Zenith now gets ingame, as well, but a white screen that covers menus and part of the game display unfortunately renders it unplayable.

Pac-Panic is now fully up to Playable, and I was able to complete a full game and enter a high score. (There are unfortunately still visual issues with the backgrounds, but they don't affect gameplay and menus are fully navigable.)

[gray badge]

C O N T E N T

I forgot to unzip the games. I requested edit access. I’ll dive into eu games as soon as winrar sees that it can unzip stuff on the nas

[merry oyster]

Don't worry, we also got a Saturn update today as well.

[strange crater]

If you want to see how great CD-i animation & art can look with the right people behind it, Labryinth of Crete appears to be running really well in the newest build.

[sinful hornet]

The Flintstones game and Link Faces of Evil are also really solidly running games

[strange crater]

Are you able to get the George Jetson side to work? For me, the Flintstone side plays fine, but the Jetson side immediately freezes.

[sinful hornet]

I walked around as George Jetson in the Flintstone world

[valid cairn]

Yabba dabba do

[gray badge]

This is what I’m seeing for every game I boot (I get the cdi menu, mount the image, and hit “play cdi”). What am I doing wrong?

I’m using the eu set atm, so maybe the first few just don’t load?

[fast jacinth]

did you use the new INI?

[valid onyx]

That, it did not. However: it does boot, and runs to a certain extent! Turns out, it's a test on how to deep fry, based on how far I was able to test it. It unfortunately hangs after a bit; If you're dutch, you might learn something here!

[gray badge]

The new mister main? Yeah. I have it in the root with the ini pointing to it. The core loads (most of the time). It just won’t load the game

[fast jacinth]

strange! some games do just boot to pure blue for me.

try wand or flintones since those are known to work

[gray badge]

Ok, when I’m back home I’ll try it. This is also on my mister pi, so I dunno if there is weirdness there

[valid onyx]

I'm also running misterpi

with no real issues

[gray badge]

Ok good

It’s either they won’t boot (again, only tried the first 3 EU games) or I’m doing something wrong

Equally likely

[sinful hornet]

If a game was loading weird I usually try the reset option or even reload the core and it sorts it out

[spring gate]

Are you definitely using the bespoke version of main that is needed?

[gray badge]

It’s definitely in my sd card root as mister_cdi with the line in the ini file

Can I verify that it’s loaded in the core?

[spring gate]

Does the previous version of the core work?

[gray badge]

I haven’t tried it. I will when I get home (Slamy updated before I started testing, so I didn’t bother with the older core)

[valid onyx]

Might be case sensitive. Might need to be MiSTer_CDi

[stiff flare]

You might still need the custom MiSTer he posted a while back if you don’t have it already. I’ve pinned it.

[gray badge]

I’m pretty sure I’m running that. When I’m back home I’ll check the osd

[valid onyx]

You can also start with a known working one - Defender Of the crown seems pretty solid

[gray badge]

Yeah, double checked that. It’s that case in both the file and ini

I need to unzip everything. I only unzipped Europe

[spring gate]

For people who have used the most recent .rbf and the previous, is the current build as stable or should we stick to testing on the previous?

[valid onyx]

for me the newer one seemed better on a test of 1 out of 1.

[nocturne vortex]

I have to completely restart mister each time to switch to get the Philips screen with the play button, switch NTSC and launch a game. If I don’t I get teal screen like yours and NTSC never saves / stays working.

[valid onyx]

I use pal though

[sinful hornet]

How can I be added to the cool testers drop down on the eu sheet? The usa sheet didn't have that technology

I tried Scotland Yard and it worked pretty well. I was surprised this board game had a video game adaptation

[spring gate]

I am not sure what has happened there, I think someone must have messed with something on the sheet, I will have to look tomorrow

[strange crater]

I think it’s more stable - I haven’t done too much with the previous dated core, though.

In my experience, everything’s an improvement in these new releases except L’affaire Morlov, which no longer boots but did in the wandofgamelon core.

Granted, Morlov had color issues in the wandofgamelon core which essentially made menu navigation impossible at this point, so it’s not too much of a loss.

Shot in the dark, but my first guess would be that it’s some form of scratched/dirty disc protection kicking in, as I’ve seen that appearing recently in a few titles like Kether, Inca, and International Tennis Open.

[spring gate]

I had a dirty disc message in an educational disc, Cartoon something, is logged on the sheet. I wonder if it is timing issues being off?

[stiff flare]

Did you clean the disc?

[wintry dust]

blow on it

[sly sedge]

Dirty, dirty disc...

[gray badge]

So, I can get games loading (arcade classics does exactly what Elphive says it does), but other games don't boot (or give the same error that is being reported)

[spring gate]

Are you seeing different results to those logged by others on the sheet using the same build?

[gray badge]

yeah, for instance, I get a BSOD on Accelerator on the latest build

oh wait, that's the 27th. 29th is the latest build

nevermind. should I go to the 27th in order to test with a known good NTSC build?

or should we catalog regressions?

[spring gate]

It sounds like the new build may be three steps forward, two steps back. If you are testing on the new build definitely log any instances if the game worked better before and now there are issues

[gray badge]

You forget how amazing the inca intro is - even without sound

[strange crater]

So far, excluding L'affaire Morlov, I've only encountered them in games with multiple revisions (Kether, Inca, etc.), and this issue only affects one revision.

[strange crater]

And in Inca, that's existed in every release of the core, and isn't gamebreaking because of the passcode feature. Kether doesn't work either way, not getting past the New Game screen in any revision.

[strange crater]

I was going to say that I thought multi-BIN wasn't working, but Alien Gate is now running in the new core flawlessly

All three versions work, but if you're going to try it, try the one marked Rev 4.

I think that's the most fun of the three - I hadn't spent too much time with it before now, and it's a lot less of a traditional shooter than I imagined. It's much more like a boss rush, with each wave of enemies having a different pattern and routine.

[strange crater]

I'm able to replicate this bluescreen on the core from the 27th and the current core from the 29th.

Since it agrees with the notes from niallquinn (excluding the color of the screen), I don't think this is a regression unless someone can get it running on an earlier core. I haven't been able to so far.

[gray badge]

alright, i will just continue on

I assume the archive for Voyeur (USA) (11220928 03) is corrupt for everyone? I have downloaded it twice

[spring gate]

Corrupt in what way?

[strange crater]

Yeah, that's how I got it. Supposedly, it's a different revision, but it doesn't seem like it extracts correctly.

It's part of the Non-Redump set, and I couldn't find an alternate copy.

[gray badge]

wont unzip

[strange crater]

I'll add a note to it on the page mentioning that.

Unless someone knows of another source for this version (message me if you do), probably best to mark that as Undumped.

[spring gate]

Feel free to mark as undumped on the sheet (unless/until a good dump ever turns up)

May be worth removing from your pack

[strange crater]

Done.

[copper flicker]

Voyeur (USA).chd Does boot into game. Just enter **3333 **then accept. The mister has it blacked out but it does work. Dont move the controller and press "A" on Joy 4 times , then move slightly right to hit accept Screenshot is just an image from YT for a guide

Ingame on mister.. some are working fine other gfx are messed up. Game works though

[strange crater]

The .BIN/.CUE I have do the same thing. Again, the keypad is just blacked out, and there are visual glitches with the background.

[copper flicker]

Then I'm guessing bincue vs chd is the same.. my sets are all chd

[copper flicker]

Cartoon Jukebox (USA, Europe).chd Does show the dirty or damaged error, but you can bypass it by pressing "GO" Game works fine then on Mister... Screenshot taken from PC Retroarch CDi Core.. The Dirty Disc error does not happen in Retroarch emulation

Flintstones-Jetsons Timewarp (Europe).chd 29092024 - George Jetson side does not freeze, it works fine

[lyric briar]

Will it be possible to emulate the MPEG encoder card some day in this core on the Mister or would that be completely impossible?

[strange crater]

OK, so I think I figured out what I was doing. If you mash the button multiple times on that screen where you choose between Fred Flintstone and George Jetson, do you also get stuck?

If I hit it once for either character, it works fine. This goes for both my original BIN+CUE and the CHD.

[copper flicker]

I pressed it once and it worked... can't test button mashing atm

[strange crater]

Fair enough. If you get a chance, let me know - I was able to replicate it by pressing the button three times on that screen while selecting a character, causing the cursor to change into a black circle before getting stuck on that screen. It would then swap between that and a black star when you click.

[copper flicker]

Ok I'll try give me couple of hrs. Try the same behaviour using retroarch emulator and see what actually happens in the game with multiple clicks

[copper flicker]

Yes multiple clicks on either character freezes the game. 1 click works fine.. I tried multiple clicks in emaultion via RA and althoguh icon changes from square to circle, it foes progress into the game. Mister it doesnt...

[lunar nexus]

I got pit a spit cloth and gave it a gentle clean. New version 29th? Time to try more stuff tonight.

[lunar nexus]

Now, I'm really puzzled, with the 29th build, Namco Arcade is all over the place with corrupt graphcis, both in loading and starting the game, and it was almost perfect on the 27th build. Can anyone else confirm, or is it just me?

[stiff flare]

Very normal to see. Sometimes things get broken as they get fixed.

[nocturne vortex]

Yeah doubt you’ll see stability for many months. If slamy had to worry about never having a regression he would go crazy and kill us all and we’d deserve it

It was really cool to see an early version of this core working yesterday. Just like N64 I’m not really into the system but I’m into the process of watching a core develop, it’s exciting