Philips CD-i

[stiff flare]

I was secretly hoping Slamy was the one who reacted with 💯 as a subtle admission of wanting to kill us lmaaaaao

[lunar nexus]

I'm not knocking it or anything, just have to get back to testing tonight with the new core and update the spreadsheet, see if we get any better outcomes! 🙂

[nocturne vortex]

💯 is now the mark of death

[finite portal]

Just like the Steven Seagal gifs predicted.

The sacred texts.

[gray badge]

https://tenor.com/bmGkI.gif

[spring gate]

Mentioned yesterday, but lost in conversation, but does anyone know if any of the games in the no DVC pack use any currently unsupported peripherals i.e. lightgun, keyboard?

[strange crater]

Galaga has serious issues on all cores, while the other two games in the package (Galaxian and Ms. Pac-Man) work fine. I’ve been able to replicate the same behavior (including the intro graphics glitching the menus) on 927, 929, and wandofgamelon.

[strange crater]

I’m not sure if there’s any retail software that uses the keyboard outside of Web-i. And that’s a web browser that requires a modem - I’m not sure if any Mono-I model supports it.

As for the lightgun, it just behaves the same as a mouse. It uses a technology kind of like a Wiimote to structure its sensors around the TV.

[spring gate]

Oh that's interesting, I assumed there would be educational software that used the keyboard. I will have to dig around and see if there is anything that really uses it, maybe some homebrew.

Does the core have proper USB mouse support already?

Ah found this:
CD-i KeyControl

The CD-i KeyControl is a full-sized QWERTY-keyboard for all CD-i players. It could be used to enter FTS-titles in the player shell, for navigating the Internet using CD-Online or Web-i, and with some dedicated titles such as the Dutch encyclopedias from Philips.

So some titles could use it, I wonder if there is a list out there, I'm curious now.

This seems to be all the peripherals here:

http://www.icdia.co.uk/accesories/pointing.html

I wonder if trackball will also just work if mouse is supported, or if it has different protocols

The plus side is, for CDi there isn't a wealth of weird peripherals to be supported. It looks like gamepad and mouse should cover pretty much everything

[stiff flare]

Lightgun!

[spring gate]

That may be simple to get working virtually using a mouse/wii-mote. I am not 100% how other cores with virtual lightguns work exactly, if it is basically that once you have mouse support it is easy to also control lightgun games this way

Obviously would need SNAC for proper CRT support using the Peacekeeper gun

Would be good to get a list of all the lightgun games as well, and which are non DVC (if any)

Wikipedia lists these ones, no idea if it is comprehensive or not:
Atlantis: The Last Resort
Burn:Cycle
Chaos Control
Crime Patrol
Crime Patrol 2: Drug Wars
The Last Bounty Hunter
The Lost Ride
Mad Dog McCree
Mad Dog II: The Lost Gold
Thunder in Paradise
Who Shot Johnny Rock?

out of those need to check which are in the Non DVC pack, I have seen Who Shot Johnny Rock I am sure

[terse flare]

There is not yet any support for other peripherals than the spoon paddle controller. But I think @signal jay is working on something.

Your words are confusing me. I've just tried it in hope to find the holy grail but 27 and 29 look exactly the same. The glitches depend on the previous animation. There is some framebuffer mixing used if I look correctly. The effects are probably not correctly applied.

[spring gate]

Doing a quick check, Burn Cycle seems to be the only non DVC lightgun game in that list. There is a beta of Who Shot Johnny Rock, however not a retail version, so probably this beta should be removed from the non DVC pack

[strange crater]

Done.

I don’t think Burn:Cycle was designed with a lightgun in mind - there was at least one section, the Mind Maze near the end, that definitely plays best with a D-pad and would be unplayable with a lightgun.

CD Shoot supports a lightgun, I believe.

[gray badge]

i played burn cycle on pc to completion

no lightgun (obv)

[young grotto]

is wiimote as mouse "a thing" ? that might be quite a good way to play a mouse-heavy console

[spring gate]

Yeah it should work on any core that has mouse support as a way to control the mouse cursor

It doesn't sound like the core has mouse support yet, the mouse cursor is obviously movable by d-pad currently though

[young grotto]

neat

does anyone know the name of a cdi game where you played golf? the twist was you played it on planets, like you played it around the circular picture of a planet, different planets had different gravity and it would tell you facts about them inbetween levels i think

played it in school

the gravity affected the golf physics

[strange crater]

Solar System

[spring gate]

Hmm, not sure, however I did noticed there are 5 games in the UK folder within Europe regional breakdown, and two of those titles are Golf Games

-ah, OK, so neither of those

[young grotto]

thanks elphive lol

[spring gate]

But anyone looking for something to test, that UK folder only has 5 games and all are obviously English friendly

[young grotto]

mini

core memory unlocked

[spring gate]

Oh, it's Patrick Moore!

[lunar nexus]

Sorry was entirely my mistake, @strange crater explained it above, I now get the same as before, Galaxians is fine, I tried another game on it! Sorry for the confusion.

[fast jacinth]

tired: hoping for DVC support one day so you can watch movies on CDi wired: hoping for modem support one day so you can browse etsy on CDi

[modern mirage]

Cdi Movies will be horribly low rez. 4K !!

I spent thousands to go 4k and I am never going back

[strange crater]

See, you play the VCD on the CD-i core

You put it into a RetroTINK 4K

Upscale it

[gray badge]

took the words right out of my mouth

[modern mirage]

no I get the film on a 4k Bluray and play in on my 4k Oled

upscaling from what sub 1080 to 4k will be horrible

[strange crater]

See, you add scanlines, make your 4K OLED look like an ancient CRT

and p r o f i t

[modern mirage]

no thats one of the things I never do. My Oled is vastly superior to the CRT I used to own

and scanlines are just a limitation of CRT tech

[gray badge]

listen, the secret to retrogaming is to spend hundreds of dollars to replicate a 70 dollar CRT from 1994

[modern mirage]

for some people it seems that way

and a tink is thousands of dollars

I for one having lived with CRT's in the 70, 80s could not wait to see the back of them

[gray badge]

nah, 750 dollars

now if I bought a second

then it would be thousands

[pale ivy]

THis is my dream

[nocturne vortex]

Scanlines were a limitation of video game hardware. Couldn’t draw the NTSC 480i and execute game logic so 240p was a hack

Err not really scanlines for the pedants

But I love CRTs, my oled can die in a fire for 80s/90s games

And my other panels, one big toxic fire

[glacial herald]

Pulling CRTs out of the literal trash for that motion clarity!

[sly sedge]

We only used CRTs back then because there was nothing better.

[gray badge]

how dare you

[sly sedge]

LOL

Okay, you got me. 😄

[gray badge]

god, my friend had one of those, and his dad was SO PARANOID about the lenses being jiggled

because then it had to be recalibrated

what an awful tv

[sly sedge]

Clearly a better alternative in every way. 😏

[pale ivy]

What is it?

[gray badge]

front project tvs of course

[pale ivy]

When it was properly calibrated did it look good?

[gray badge]

no

it never looked good

[nocturne vortex]

Probably looked like that

[gray badge]

it was a garbage technology for rich suburban dads to watch football on

[nocturne vortex]

How could it not in a well lit room it would be a POS I’m sure

[strange crater]

CRT projectors have been a nightmare basically since the day they were created lol

However, they are supposedly the reason why Philips made the decision not to have the light gun use beam scan like other consoles. Meaning they’re also the reason why CD-i light guns work on modern TVs without issues

[spring gate]

Anyone excited about watching VCDs, I can assure you they look rough on a modern display, and the sound isn't great either. 240p is half the resolution of a DVD.

[stiff flare]

yeah I’m not, I just want to play fmv games like thunder in paradise

[spring gate]

All the extra games and other weird content you will be able to play with the DVC card is much more exciting

[wintry dust]

maybe I have some "special" VCDs I want to watch.....

[spring gate]

Well if you put it that way, rip and share them and I will be happy to help do some "testing" on the core...

[strange crater]

There are whole games developed using menu functionality supported on that VCD player. Pirates being a key example, as one of the more recent ones.

And joking aside about its relevance to 4K video, I’d legitimately really like to see what the CRT shaders can do with it, as DVC games from that time period look pretty spectacular on period-accurate display hardware.

[spring gate]

I didn't realise people had made games in VCD format. It makes sense though, they even did it with the Photo CD format.

There is probably a VCD version of Dragon's Lair as that was on everything.

[strange crater]

No - there was a dedicated CD-i version which used the DVC, though.

It did also get ported to DVD players

[finite portal]

I've watched VCDs through my CD-i and Saturn using my Tink5x before. It looks about how you'd expect. Shaders over blocky video.

You can see those artifacts even on a CRT using composite. It looked fine for the time.

[nocturne vortex]

Like watching segacd video, even on a crt best to sit back and maybe squint 😬. But yeah early days of CD anything at all was impressive

[lavish crow]

There are games on VCD? Just looked through the whole redump and everything was movies, promo discs with a couple documentaries/exercise videos

[spring gate]

Is news to me as well mate, Elphive mentioned it earlier

[strange crater]

Yeah - the Philips VideoCD Toolkit 2.0 supports making menus for your discs. That's how Pirates was made, alongside a few other recent CD-i VCD releases with interactive functionality.

[raw leaf]

This is what I'm talking about!

What a library

[lunar nexus]

Anyway, getting a little back on topic, with the 29th build, is anyone finding much difference or more booting? Thanks! Only I tried a load, and it was the same results apart from the BSOD looks a solid sky blue now, with no little pixels on it. THanks!

[terse flare]

You will not find much difference. Fixing this blue Screen was the only Change of 29

[lunar nexus]

Of course the downside of all of this, in say a years time, we will be able to play the 2 Unlimited disk, or Bryan Adams 🙂

[copper flicker]

🤣🤘

[viral pine]

editing more CD-i footage

never thought Id be doing that haha

[fast jacinth]

praying for you buddy

[viral pine]

the thumbnails are fun to make

[stiff flare]

Gotta edit her hands so she’s flipping the double bird

[viral pine]

haha good idea

I felt like the left image gave some...vibes lolol

[stiff flare]

“oh god why am I in this game??!?”

[viral pine]

I was thinking more like "someone made a Zelda blow up doll" 🤣

[gleaming echo]

hahaha it does look like that xD

[stiff flare]

OH GOD lol

[sinful hornet]

https://tenor.com/view/wat-what-clonehigh-gif-4724090

She's doing Clone High hands

[iron valley]

This is hilarious. Nice work, my friend.

[merry oyster]

CD-i Youtube thumbnails practically make themselves on their own!

[lavish crow]

Is the CD-I the greatest meme console ever? The Zelda games, Hotel Mario and Thunder in Paradise are top tier meme material

[spring gate]

I finally got the new pack downloaded, unzipped, and copied over to MiSTer, so can hopefully start doing some proper testing this week.

People still working through the TBC game entries?

[gray badge]

the one linked on the sheet? or is there a new new one

[spring gate]

The pack? Yeah the non DVC testing one, that has everything on the first 6 tabs on the sheet i.e. every game that doesn't require DVC for the system

[gray badge]

gotcha, I just was making sure we didn't have an updated non DVC one

and yeah, I think TBC games that don't have a name next to them are still up for grabs

[spring gate]

Would be good to get the rest of the general Europe tab ran through, as well as the handful in Homebrew and UK exclusives

[strange crater]

Well, I just found a whole new category of CD-i software to look for.

Muzak CDs

Turns out, most CD background music systems from the late 90s to the early 2010s used CD-i players.

[sinful hornet]

Gotta make someone test them all 😅

[valid cairn]

Sounds interesting

I found this little explanation on a forum

What is CD-BGM?
CD-BGM or CD-BackGround Music is a type of CD defined by Philips, Sanyo and Shinano-Kenshi in the mid 80s. Sometimes the system is being refered to as BMS (Background Music System). CD-BGM is used to store up to 10 hours of audio to use a background music in stores, shopping malls, etc. CD-BGM uses ADPCM level B mono audio to accomplish this. The music was stored in 8 tracks, all of which were devided in titles. Usually there were about 15 titles per track, resulting in about 120 songs per disc (about 8 hours). Although dedicated professional CD-BGM players were made available to play the discs (of which the Philips BMS 3000 was the most well-known), every CD-BGM disc also needs to include a CD-i application to allow for playback on a CD-i player.

It is not defined what features this application should include, as long it allows for the music to be reproduced on a CD-i player. This is why the early CD-BGM discs from Sanyo showed a screen devided in two halfs, with the upper half displaying 'start', and the lower half displaying 'stop'! Actually, these discs were the first commercially released discs for CD-i ever. Fortunately, Philips put some more attention to its CD-i application for CD-BGM. It show a list of all tracks that are available on the disc, which can then be selected for playback. Several hundreds of CD-BGM titles were made by Philips alone. Note: you cannot buy CD-BGM discs, they could only be 'rented' by professional users from selected Philips partners."

On Muzak Cd's around 1992 it is posted: "play on a Muzak CD-i player"
Muzak is some kind of backgroundmusic, some classical rock which apparently used this kind of format for its releases.

[spring gate]

Wow, this is news to me. Have people managed to dump these?

[lunar nexus]

2666 dumps in the Redump collection. 12 are MIA. So there's just a few to try. 🙂

[terse flare]

Woah, that actually fits the descriptions from Philips.

[spring gate]

Wow, 2666 dumped? Are these purely audio?

[sly sedge]

That's 2,226 CD-i dumps total, not CD-BGM format discs specifically.
http://redump.org/discs/system/cdi/

http://www.wiki.redump.org/index.php?title=CD-BGM_Missing

No CD-BGM are currently dumped in Redump.

...for what that's worth.

[valid cairn]

I copy pasted it from here http://cdinteractive.co.uk/forums/cdinteractive/viewtopic.php?t=903

Some interesting discussion about it there

From some guys who produced them

[tulip orchid]

does it make any difference where we place the [CD-i]
main=MiSTer_CDi in the .ini file?

I'm assuming at the bottom below everything is fine, or at least that used to be what was recommended ;)

[wintry dust]

bottom below everything is fine, and probably best because it means you can't accidentally screw it up

[gray badge]

doesn't matter. just make sure the names match

[tulip orchid]

based on something I seen earlier I take it chd's are fine?

[gray badge]

yep

there is something on the fgpa discord that, in some outlying cases, CHD may not work? but that seems to be disupted too

[spring gate]

Catching up now, so looks like BGM discs have not been successfully dumped.

[raw leaf]

Oh god I need thousands of hours of muzak

[spring gate]

Wikka needs something to play in his elevator.

[raw leaf]

https://youtu.be/rzGqeecdC60?si=2DqTxuWUCx_kArFL

[tulip orchid]

I must be missing something. I can get to the cd-i boot screen, but only get a blue screen after trying to load a game. Link the faces of evil is the game I'm trying to load in chd format. I've tried pal and ntsc in the settings.

[raw leaf]

It's early days still for the core, are you sure its meant to work?

[tulip orchid]

yeah we've got a google docs page with games that are playable in the pinned section of the chat

[raw leaf]

Aha

[tulip orchid]

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

there's probably just some quirk or something I'm missing, like one of the cores I think it's saturn requires you to choose the firmware every time heh

[spring gate]

Do you have the bespoke Main you need to run the core?

[tulip orchid]

yeah like i said i'm getting to the cd-i boot page with the play button

i've tried multiple chd's, no joy

[spring gate]

Ah, CHD may be the issue there we are testing the bin/cue versions

[tulip orchid]

oh? i heard they were working fine heh

[sinful hornet]

CHD works

[tulip orchid]

I guess it's possible that secondary boot file i picked up was bad

have we dropped all the files needed for this here on discord?

[valid onyx]

I've only tested with chd's.

seems to work fine

[sinful hornet]

You definitely got the special mister main and renamed it to match that ini entry?

[tulip orchid]

oh hell that's my issue, i added to the .ini but didn't pick up a special mister main

that'll fix it i'm sure

is it ok to have both mister files in there, or is it best to drop the old one?

[strange crater]

I’ve got around 55 now. There are some dumped publicly, just not all of them.

[sinful hornet]

You can have both as long as you rename the new special one

[tulip orchid]

right, you're telling that core to use the new one by name

I was actually one of the crazy guys that bought one of these cd-i's as a kid - I had the magnavox variation that came with the remote style controller

I had to order the games through snail mail

I see the DVC hasn't been added, I sincerely hope that's going to be possible.

[spring gate]

Oh, what format are they dumped in? I wonder if any emulator can play them

[strange crater]

.bin, mostly (I think I've got one with a .CUE sheet).

I've got one running on the MiSTer, but it's not doing too much given there's no audio yet:

[spring gate]

Oh wow, that's cool it is running at all

[tulip orchid]

@terse flare is DVC support going to be possible?

[spring gate]

With DVC, has been said before, it would potentially come after the core is fully completed without it. It is worth noting though is it is very complex and (as far as I am aware) not well documented. It feels a bit like asking for 32x support when someone has just started to get a Megadrive emulator to boot some games.

[tulip orchid]

at least they aren't impossible to find or expensive...$100 on ebay

where some arcade boards are lost forever to time :(

http://www.icdia.co.uk/docs/mcd270ts.pdf

this may already be out there but there is actually some documentation on this chip

http://www.icdia.co.uk/docs/

@wintry dust any thoughts on that pdf I linked? i mean it shows the internal functionality and memory maps

I would think between this PDF and just buying one of these cartridges we should be well on our way ...but then what do I know >.>

maybe I'm way off base

[wintry dust]

he'll address it when he gets to it

there's a ton of other stuff to do

[tulip orchid]

yeah of course, I wondered since you have core dev experience if you felt that pdf would do the trick - ah well I'm sure getting this far and clearly being a fan he's likely got all of that documentation already

[terse flare]

I think most here already have summed it up. The situation of the DVC is similar to the whole CD and audio stuff. The PDF you have sent is just a "technical summary" to get an overview on the chip. We also don't have more for the CDIC and its companion DSP. The big difference is already performed reverse engineering efforts, enabling us to have some working CD-i emulators in software at all. This might will also be a topic I can't handle alone. For debugging it's much easier to have a working software emulator at first. And this is something which someone ... anybody ... - I'm looking at all of you - can already tackle today. When I started this in June, I had no intention of doing the DVC at all, as I had no information at hand while most of the other stuff was already dissected. I didn't even believe I got this far. I'm also not able to fork myself into another person. All of this takes time. The DVC is a completely different machine. I personally like the comparison with the 32X made by moondandy as this is quite correct. The 32X has it's own video output and lives a life on its own, while the DVC does the same.

A custom hardware maker could produce the ultimate expansion card for the CD-i with 3D capabilities.

[wintry dust]

imagine how many they'd sell!

[raw leaf]

Put a MiSTer in it

[dawn iris]

The dvc connect to the 68000. It’s better to do the hole cdi system first and then see how much space is left. But tbh the interesting part of the cdi is the dvc in my eyes.

I found an interesting site, I share the link

http://www.icdia.co.uk/docs/

[gleaming echo]

Yeah if it can fit then hopefully he can work it out, if not then when the core is complete maybe someone will fork what is needed and make a DVC core

[young grotto]

maybe the core will draw out some long lost documentation or something you never know

there's always some random guy with a garage full of documents they didn't realize anyone cared about

[tulip orchid]

I imagine DVC is going to die a horrible death. It's bad enough that CD-i was a rare obscure console that only crazy people like me bought. But then to add to that we're talking about an add-on that almost nobody had not to mention there's very little interest generally speaking in this console. But who knows, crazier things have happened...I mean nobody thought we'd see an N64 core either ;)

[raw leaf]

My hope is that the DVC doesn't have very tight timing tolerances and that it can somehow be handled by a video decoder on the HPS side.

I need to learn about

• magnet
• venus
• greek statue
• solar flares

And Elon Musks grandpa is going to take me on that voyage

[spring gate]

So weird but of trivia, that chap is Sir Patrick Moore, who was Britain's most renowned astronomer. He appeared in loads of TV programmes back in the day explaining the solar system and space etc. bizarrely he also wound up playing "The Games Master" in the biggest gaming show in the UK in the 80s and 90s. A cyborg floating head.

[raw leaf]

Is that why he's a floating head on the cover of this?

[spring gate]

https://youtu.be/JCuPX_tmOOo?si=PenMKevB_igOKT4c

[young grotto]

yeah thats the gamesmaster

[raw leaf]

Slices of English culture that have slipped me by

[spring gate]

Looking back it is really bizarre he was The Games Master. I can't even think of a good comparison person from the US to explain how odd it is. This guy was a knight of the realm, and a serious rebound scientist, and he also played this cyborg floating head setting Sonic the Hedgehog time trials for kids on a gaming TV show

[young grotto]

he had a weekly show about the stars called the sky at night it was kind of an institution

[spring gate]

Yeah, that was a big one

[nocturne vortex]

Maybe we could start digging up the graves of Philips engineers until we find the DVC technical documentation clutched in their corpse arms. Then we just chain RevendGumby to a chair until it’s finished.

[young grotto]

maybe his kids/grandkids were way into games and he did it so they'd think he was cool?

thats why a lot of actors were on star trek 😄

[spring gate]

I wonder if he even knew what he was talking about at any level on Games Master. Maybe he had a great sense of humour and thought it funny.

[young grotto]

there's always decap and trace

his bits were probably filmed elsewhere, possibly even at his house

it'd always just be a tight shot on a greenscreen

[pastel plank]

DVC even had a service manual...

[strange crater]

The disc also has its historical section voiced by Tom Baker, who played the Fourth Doctor on Doctor Who.

It’s not the only thing Baker voiced on the CD-i, also doing a disc called “Gnomes” which created a fictional history and taxonomy of gnome life. It’s really adorable, and up there with my favorite non-game discs.

[young grotto]

gamesmaster is out on discs?

[lunar nexus]

He's just one of those people that's ideal for doing voice work. Fits perfectly. Like Richard Burton in War of the Worlds. He's also a really nice bloke, always at the Dr Who conventions. Very polite and has time for people. Sorry a bit off topic!

[radiant minnow]

He's the best doctor, and when I think about the Doctor Who series, his image comes immediately to my imagination.
He was the best known doctor here in Spain because he was the first doctor to appear here.

[lunar nexus]

@spring gate can't see this on the spreadsheet, but, Rise Of The Robots, Boots okay, plays the intros great, them hangs them starting the game though.

[modern mirage]

You refer to Tom Baker as the Only Doctor. All others are pale immitations

[modern mirage]

Thank whatever you believe in you have been saved from the worst game ever made

[raw leaf]

What about Peter Cushing

He was an only doctor

[modern mirage]

Tom Baker all the way

[spring gate]

Hmm, do you know what section this should be in? Is it part of the pack or one not in there but in Redump?

[lunar nexus]

I think it's a redump, not sure though. I got it from the archive, cdi version has it's own page.

[spring gate]

@strange crater do you know what folder this one should be in?

[strange crater]

DVC Games. From what I understand, the game requires its RAM and won’t load without it.

[tulip orchid]

the CD-i player offloads the MPEG video/audio decoding to the DVC as well

the games that require DVC would mainly be FMV based so it would be sense

[terse flare]

"The Apprentice" is an exceptional game which enables sound effects when the DVC exists. I doesn't utilize the MPEG hardware and only uses the RAM.

[spring gate]

That's interesting, could a potential step stone to DVC be making extra ram available in the core?

Is it as simple as upping the amount in the core (maybe in an OSD toggle)?

[terse flare]

It probably doesn't even make sense to allow the option. For example, MAME always has the DVC memory intact. It seems to have no negative effects. It does however have an effect at all. The operating system will prefer DVC memory over the internal one and that actually makes sense as the CPU no longer requires sharing memory bandwidth with the video generation. At least this is what I assume right now. For my internal analysis I've removed the DVC memory from MAME to have the same memory layout because of this.

[young grotto]

does that mean DVC actually improved performance in all games?

[terse flare]

This is actually a very good question. I don't know actually. This is something the homebrew developers might know.

[young grotto]

memory contention can be a really big performance bottleneck

[terse flare]

In the end I will just map some memory into the specific area and I assume the game will just use it. But we are not there yet.
I've just asked the question over there. Hopefully they will know. My first thought on this was that The Apprentice uses the extra RAM to store sample data. But this was only my assumption. If the DVC indeed increases the speed... then the core needs some overclocking. I still need to build a CD-i link cable to execute code from a PC. This way I could execute some real benchmarks.

[young grotto]

i found a page online saying the apprentice is known to use extra ram if available

apparently some dvc cards were just ram no mpeg?

https://www.cdiemu.org/site/dvcarts.htm

[terse flare]

No, this is just the support page of the closed source CD-i emulator

[young grotto]

oh i see they aren't describing the real cards

[stray plank]

Finally got around to trying the core. Tim & Bear at the hospital (Dutch version), that I worked on for a little bit as an intern, partly works. The coloring book looks incorrect and doesn't seem to work. The main game works, I could play a whole story of the bear, but then it froze after selecting Tim.

Already super cool to see. Can't wait to hear the audio, that I was brainwashed with at the time, again 😅

I see the European version is marked as a prototype, I'm pretty sure the Dutch version was released commercially.

I still have at least one disc, that I got for free at the time, that might have not been dumped yet. A few years ago I came across one or more other ones, I'll have to look them up.

[terse flare]

This is only for stability during resets and NTSC edge cases. No new features in this version.
SDRAM: Fixed hang caused by aborted memory burst. During resets, the burst signal is lost. Fixed sdram state machine to catch this case. (This is the most important change of this update)
SCC68070: Fixed Timer reload reset
NVRAM: Fixed bus_ack behaviour
ICA: Delay first fetch until no hblank
MCD212: Ensure uninterrupted DCA execution by delaying SDRAM refresh

[stiff flare]

[terse flare]

I originally intended to tackle these issues after adding audio, but these stability problems worried me as they could have lead to bigger issues. I decided to attack them now but wasted a whole week of core working time on it. But well, I now expect that every reset shall hit its target and the system should boot again. If you find cases where this is not the case, please tell me.

The way these issues were found was quite curious. I've adapted my simulator to be able to simulate multiple CD-i machines in lock step. I booted one machine into a game, resetted it and then compared both machines clock for clock to check for differences. It was quite insane.

[stiff flare]

I won’t profess to understand all of it, but your development efforts and transparency about it is wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing that with us.

[iron valley]

Hmmm, I wonder if I messed something up. I can't get games to boot now for some reason, but I did use the latest MiSTer unstable build that recently dropped.

The core boots, and resets just fine now.

[stiff flare]

I forgot, I should test out MGL with the core.

[terse flare]

To be honest, I don't even know if I should write it like this. It might be too technical and irrelevant for most readers here. I could also write only that the reset behavior is fixed. I just thought people might feel being part of development.

[terse flare]

Hmm... The MiSTer unstable builds do not contain the CD-i changes. It is required to still use the custom build which is pinned.

[iron valley]

Ah, makes sense. I'll swap back to it. Thank you.

[terse flare]

There is something pinned which I didn't try yet. It seems to be possible to pin a MiSTer Main to a single core.

[iron valley]

Oh, that sounds awesome.

[terse flare]

This way you can still update your normal MiSTer Main as usual and the CD-i core will still work. I intend to integrate the CD-i changes only AFTER I know that everything relevant for the core is part of the changes. As the CD hardware is still incomplete, I don't know what still might be missing.

[iron valley]

Is it the pin that says: "Add this to your MiSTer.ini
[CD-i]
main=MiSTer_CDi"?

And if so, do I need to name the MiSTer for CD-i "MiSTer_CDi"?

[terse flare]

Yes, you need to change also the name

[iron valley]

On it, thanks so much. This clarification is excellent.

[terse flare]

Is this your first time with the CD-i core?

[iron valley]

No, I've been testing it as much as I can possibly fit into my schedule since the initial release and the second one.

I had added the text to my ini, but didn't fully understand what that did. Now I get it and it's excellent,.

[nocturne vortex]

That Main swapping feature gets used for groovy_mister as well which is permanently its own main due to changes that won’t go into master. The custom downloader db stuff should eventually do distribution for that like was done for N64 for a while

[spring gate]

Thanks for the update Slamy, was just doing some testing and found the core hanging after a few resets and also refusing to load things after awhile giving false negatives for some games. Hopefully this new version fixes some of that

[stray plank]

Tim & Bear at the airport (Dutch) seems to be working quite well. The animations are fun to watch.

Made on the Amiga with Deluxe Paint

Wow, I'm in the credits, nice 😄

[stiff flare]

Woah seriously??

That’s cool as hell!

[sly sedge]

Don't worry Robby. One day it will happen to you.

You keep at it pal. 😉

[stray plank]

Yeah, I didn't know. I didn't have a CD-i player and didn't get those CDs. I vaguely remember working on the coloring book images, to make them work correctly in the game(s).

First time I played these actually.

[stiff flare]

One day Marvel will accept my drawings of Spider-Flash, a literal spider who moves really fast

[sly sedge]

...takes notes

Interesting. Go on...

[stray plank]

I remember them working on the Thomas Cook CD. And also, what was probably the 'Joy of Sex'. They asked us who wanted to work on that, in a separate room 😄 It ended up being an English colleague. One day when we called him for lunch, he came down the stairs closing his zipper 😂

I started my internship working on their CD-i game engine, on a Sun SPARCstation, before moving on to work on an Amiga 4000.

[sinful hornet]

Did you have any in depth documentation on the dvc that you saved? 😄

[stray plank]

Hahaha, sadly not. It was the first time I saw 'full motion video', I wasn't really impressed by the quality. The eight CPU Silicon Graphics Onyx that came in while I was there, took one whole night to encode a single movie to FMV, at something like 320 x 200 pixels.

I helped out with 68K assembly optimizing for their CD-i software, as I was used to that on the Amiga.

[merry oyster]

Stability increases! 🔥 🔥

[stiff flare]

@terse flare do you have a .sv file with "parameter CONF_STR" defined?

should say something like "S0,CUECHD,Insert CD;"

oh oops, I got this confused with the Super Cassette Vision core, you have it all on Github. I can check myself!

yeah it's index 0, perfect

[merry oyster]

https://tenor.com/view/take-him-away-king-harkinian-zelda-cdi-wand-of-gamelon-cdi-gif-26896790

[stiff flare]

sorry, in my head there are two new cores in development and I confused the two for a second

[terse flare]

I'm confused. Please explain your thoughts.

[stiff flare]

I'm creating MGL files, which if you're not familiar are basically shortcuts to launch a core and a game. Here's an example:

    <rbf>_Console/CD-i</rbf>
    <file delay="1" type="s" index="0" path="/media/fat/games/CD-i/USA/Link - The Faces of Evil/Link - The Faces of Evil (USA).chd"/>
</mistergamedescription>```

I needed to know the following:

• type: Either f for load file to memory or s for mount file.
• index: Pointer to slot where file is loaded in core.

Here's the documentation covering MGL files - https://mister-devel.github.io/MkDocs_MiSTer/advanced/mgl/

[terse flare]

I thought I was the only insane person to sort the games by region

[stiff flare]

Nope! Most people do that here.

Now the insane part is then placing each region's bios within each region folder so you have a correct system boot-up per region. 🤣

I do that for the Saturn and SegaCD cores lol

[terse flare]

I didn't knew until now about these MGL files. The MiSTer is surely mysterious. On the other hand, this could mean that the documentation is not so good. xD

I've also noticed something right now.

CD-i: Insert disc
PCE: Insert CD
PSX: Load CD
SATURN: Insert Disk
MCD: Insert Disk

From a user interface design perspective this is horrible. Disk is usually reserved for magnetic media while Disc is for optic.

Maybe I'll also call it CD in the next version. But that's just cosmetic I think. It's better than Disk

[wintry dust]

gonna PR it all to 'insert optical media'

[finite portal]

I vote for standardizing on Load CD, since there's no insert involved with MiSTer.

[gray badge]

you're just not trying hard enough

[sly sedge]

Today I learned that I am insane, and apparently have been for years. Who knew?

[spring gate]

Would be a good idea to standardise these load/insert CD options...

Is the plan for later on for the games to automatically load when selected from the OSD and remove needing to select Load Disc (or whatever the text is) from the CDi BIOS menu?

[spring gate]

Anyone tried the new core? Is it more stable resetting and launching games?

[tacit garden]

FWIW as an engineer and a tinkerer, I absolutely love the technical detail. I think most of the folks in here know what's up, and I think we all get a tiny bit smarter even just by osmosis, so keep it up.
Also I'd say, it's not a waste of a week of core dev, it was necessary shit that might have cost you several weeks down the track. The core is already unfeasibly great. Love your work.

[sly sedge]

Yes, please don't change a thing. If you want to provide more information, that's great too. 🙂

Sometimes I'm more interested in the development process of a core than the core itself.

...even though I understand nothing of it. 😄

[deep roost]

Same. I'm more fascinated by it.

[sinful hornet]

Latest core does seem much more stable with resets and switching to ntsc

Haven't had to do a full core reload when hopping between multiple games even if they freeze

[spring gate]

That's great news, I stopped after finishing off the Homebrew tab as I was getting hangs and couldn't be sure if it was the core or the game

[sinful hornet]

Is there any testing benefit if I keep my tv mode set to ntsc? I know slamy said they mostly test pal so I could catch ntsc regressions potentially

[spring gate]

I guess it depends on what your MiSTer is outputting? Is this a CRT or modern screen?

[sinful hornet]

Just a plain modern tcl tv

[spring gate]

Your TV will converting signal to a 1080p one regardless of what MiSTer is outputting, and your MiSTer is probably set to scale the image to 1080p anyway

[sinful hornet]

I really like this screen because I can't understand what it wants me to do 😆

[spring gate]

That is... Obtuse

What game?

[sinful hornet]

It's animating. Like all the gray parts are like rotating gears

Zombie Dinos

[spring gate]

Ah nice, great work chipping away at the sheet 🙂

[sinful hornet]

I could youtube it but part of the fun to me is just being confused like this 😅

Just wondering, is there any cdi reason it couldn't be set to automatically reset when inserting a new disc? The playstation core does that

[spring gate]

I was wondering this too, if loading a game would be possible without going back to the BIOS screen and loading it. Would be a much better user experience and certainly speed up testing

[spring gate]

Looking at the Europe tab, I am surprised nobody has checked Zelda's Adventure yet

[gray badge]

I did link, but I haven’t had time to test. I’m hoping tomorrow I can devote a good chunk of the afternoon to it

[young grotto]

seems obvious to me, seduce the lizardman

[terse flare]

Philips did something wrong here. The first revision of the CD-i, the one which we are currently building in hardware here, doesn't automatically boot the software even if the game was inserted before powering up the machine. They fixed this in the next generation of the boot ROM. I don't know if there is one CD-i emulator out there which could have applied some workaround. I do know that the boot rom moves the mouse cursor to the play button when a disc is inserted. This behaviour could be tracked somehow and an automatic press of a button could be initiated. But this would be something which has to be discussed with people knowing more about this. Maybe it would even be worth to perform a ROM hack.
I don't know right now if the Mono-II boot rom is also working on Mono-I hardware. The various CD-i models are not hardware compatible to each other.

[spring gate]

Ah, that's interesting

[terse flare]

No, that is awful. Imagine you have your automatic BGM player and the power goes out. Everytime a person needs to step up and press a button to reactivate your 8 hours of music

[spring gate]

So all the BIOS files that could work on the core would perform this way?

[terse flare]

I fear so. But that might need some checking. I've never switched out the boot rom. I started with the one supported by MAME and started development without looking back

[spring gate]

Maybe something that could be tested for you, would it be a case of downloading all the BIOS files and seeing which load, and then seeing if any auto boot the game?

Would it be useful to log this on the sheet? I am assuming there is a CDi BIOS pack out there

Ah yeah, forgetting the BIOS files need to be combined don't they. That makes things less straightforward

[terse flare]

I've just checked some of the ROMs. It won't work like this. The software running on the slave controller must fit the software running on the main cpu. While all CD-i systems share the same video chip (at least they behave the same), the CD controller is different. Switching to a different ROM might not be possible without switching the hardware to replicate. If the differences between each chip set is very small, an abstraction can be build around them. Knowledge about this is rather scarce but the author of cdiemu definitely would know this as his closed source emulator is able to emulate other CD-i models as well. But this is really whipped cream on top of the cake. If this is really important for the community I would suggest that a gifted person tries to implement that in MAME first. It only supports Mono-I right now with some malfunctioning source code existing for Mono-II.

I'll take all that back. The CD-i is funny. It auto plays the software when the Play button next to the LCD is pressed once. Even if no CD is inserted it will auto play when a CD is detected. I was just curious and tested this.

[tacit garden]

Complete non-sequitur - I don't know why or how, but that golf ball really does look like Eugene Levy.

[rugged panther]

https://tenor.com/view/michael-scott-the-office-thank-you-gif-4688221

[rugged panther]

I scrolled up and don't see it which golf ball

[sly sedge]

I don't get it either.

[tacit garden]

Sorry, I just tried the Wacky World of Miniature Golf on the core for the first time. I'd never played it, first time seeing it. And Eugene Levy voices the golf ball and somehow it really looks like him.

[wintry dust]

just FYI, most of the cores that reset on cd insert, that reset is done via the HPS

[signal jay]

Does anyone have an analog stick for the CD-i who can measure what the range is of the digital values we get from it?

I am working on analog controller and mouse support and could use some feedback from people with real hardware

[terse flare]

Pushes you in the direction of the CD-i discord server where people live that actually hoard the hardware

[signal jay]

feels being pushed around

[young grotto]

i'm going to take a wild guess its -128 to 128

[terse flare]

It's actually -12 to 12. Of course they knew..

[young grotto]

really?

[terse flare]

Ah sorry, -18 to 18. It was hex

[young grotto]

thats kind of amazingly low precision for an analog stick

could be kind of interesting to map to a modern stick

[spring gate]

Any idea what is the cause of some screens showing as monochrome and garbled? You especially see it on all Photo CDs. Missing support of a graphical type?

[bronze umbra]

what's the actual practical difference of emulating the different CD models?

[terse flare]

Yes, DYUV is missing. It's on my TODO list slightly lower than the CDIC stuff as I want to at least have some audio before doing the rest of video. There are multiple features of the videochip still missing. We don't even have color math right now.

[terse flare]

There are practically none. Philips had two different "shells". Thats what they call the system menu. The latter one has a different art style and supports auto boot officially. I have a model 210 and a 450. The 450 has a slightly longer seeking time because it uses a similar mechanism as the PS1 for coarse movement (the loud grinding type) of the reading head. If you look at the 210 It uses the old magnetic type (chirpy linear motor) of movement. I sometimes like to put my ear to the drive. It sounds cute.

If you look on this website, there are screenshots from some of the shells https://www.cdiemu.org/

@bronze umbra Apart from that, every new revision of the CD-i saved money. The first models had a complex front LCD with alphanumeric characters. The next revision had some of the alphanumeric characters removed in favor of some 7 segment displays. They also removed CD audio controls and only left Play and Stop on the front panel. The next revisions removed the robust metal casing and replaced it with some cheap plastics. At the same time, the front panel and front controls were removed.

[bronze umbra]

ah, gotcha.

so it affects the particulars of the UI for interacting with the system and with the functionality of the boot ROM

so relevant for overall preservation but mostly irrelevant for individual software operation?

[terse flare]

You got it. When you ask CD-i Fan, the author of cdiemu, his emulator supports every model. But you have to pay money to add support for Mono-II to Mono-III. From a preservation perspective we need all machines. But I don't really know if that is so important for us MiSTer people here. This is like having one SNES 2chip core and one SNES 1chip core.

[stiff flare]

Yeah it’s not important for MiSTer, unless you want to do it

[terse flare]

I don't want to do it I think. There are no open source emulators available supporting Mono-II to Mono-IV. The person who developed the CDi driver for MAME stopped midway through. The code exists but it is broken. I think the author just lost interest. Having at least MAME to investigate an already "working" solution had kickstarted my motivation to begin with.

[bronze umbra]

that definitely makes it make sense why you'd just grab the baseline version and plow ahead, then

for anything as complicated as a 4th+ generation console I think "someone should emulate this first" is a pretty reasonable baseline standard to hold before diving into FPGA lol

[sinful hornet]

Is Mame the basis for the core development? Like, are you first using that as a source of truth to start coding against or is it hardware? (I don't really know how fpga development works)

[terse flare]

This is a very debatable topic and people might dislike my way of thinking. I use all available datasheets as first source and MAME as a second source for hardware behavior. I use MAME has first source for investigating software issues. For example, to trace BIOS functions, I use MAME. For video output everything is fetched from the official datasheet. In the end, FPGA development is creating a gigantic state machine.

But I also use MAME as first source for CDIC behavior. There are no datasheets. And CD either works or it doesn't. The CD drive can never be cycle accurate. It also doesn't need to

That is also why we are one step ahead of the current MAME code. We have NTSC

[wintry dust]

if you suspect that some mame code is even half correct the debugger alone is so incredibly useful

[ionic island]

software and hardware emulators work in a fundamentally different way, and while software emulators can be good for referencing at a high level how a component works, they can't really be a basis for hardware emulation per se

[lunar nexus]

I think it's fantastic, if you speak to the right people in mame, they'll help. I guess it would be better if the CDI emulator coder could help the best - either way, keep it up!

[gray badge]

Sorry @spring gate, didn't mean to step on your toes there

[spring gate]

Hah, no worries, I have moved to bottom of the sheet so feel free to test away, I will need to call it a night in a few anyway

New core seems very stable, makes it much easier to test through games

[gray badge]

yes

still need to refresh the core every so often

[terse flare]

That's sad. That means that there is still some issue somewhere. If you find some consistency in this behavior, that might help.

[gray badge]

So if you load Steel Machine (Europe) it will BSOD. If you load Strikers Pro after that, it will also BSOD. However, if you reload the core completely, Strikers Pro will load. Just reproduced those steps to be sure

not sure if that is helpful

[spring gate]

That's me having to stop for night, looks like Jesus Fish will finish off last few non regional Europe titles. I started the region exclusives and checked the UK ones

It seems a lot games will be playable once DYUV is added, a lot of garbled graphics. Zelda's Adventure is "playable" save that issue 🙂

[gray badge]

that's EU done

On to EU*

Oh wait, I don't have these games. Did they get added to the download?

[spring gate]

May be worth quickly checking the ones on the sheet previously marked No Boot on older builds, some of those could be due to core instability

[gray badge]

ahh that's a good call

[spring gate]

They should be in a subfolder within Europe

Any you recheck overwrite with your name and updated info

[terse flare]

You are all crazy >.< I mean, well, I'm crazy too I guess

[gray badge]

do you know what the folder is called? i cannot find it

[spring gate]

Starts with a 0

[gray badge]

yeah, I don't have that. I'll have to grab the download again

A couple of games went from no boot to playable (so far)

looks like the archive has been updated since I grabbed it last. I will grab it again so I can test EU stuff. But a bunch of stuff works now

[spring gate]

Ah, you may have grabbed it before everything was up

Do you have the folders of demos, prototypes and betas?

[gray badge]

Yeah, just not the 0 Europe folder in my Europe folder. Grabbing it now

[spring gate]

Nice one. Be great if collectively we can get all of regional Europe and the betas/protos/demos all checked off before next build

[rugged panther]

For those interested here he is

I... gotta say I don't think that looks anything like Eugene Levy

https://youtu.be/pIjbGeYk9GY?si=kgu-_QOi6SmNz8Mi&t=146

[copper flicker]

@terse flare Your avatar is representing you were an Amiga gamer back in the day?

[terse flare]

Yes, Turrican has shaped my mind. Especially because of the Soundtrack of Mr. Hülsbeck

Someone should port Turrican to the CD-i. I don't know if it is possible. But as there are side scrollers on this thing, it should be. The CD-i is a little bit weak on the 2D side though. There is no graphics accelerator for 2D algorithms. @copper flicker Why bring this topic up in the CD-i thread?

[radiant minnow]

We want to know about the person who has ventured to recreate the CD-i in FPGA, I guess 😄

I was and still am an avid Amiga gamer myself, well served on the MiSTer except for the lacking AGA implementation

[copper flicker]

Because I'm an amiga enthusiast since the 80s to this very day 😉

The only way to play turrican on cdi is if someone develops an amiga emulator on cdi...

[gray badge]

A lot of stuff is booting. This is great

[spring gate]

Yeah, very few things not booting and it's possible some of those only appear to not boot because the menu screen graphic format isn't supported and is shown as a black screen

[radiant minnow]

CD-i, here we gooo! 😄

[gray badge]

I’ll get netherlands finished up here. Then I need to run errands for a bit

[spring gate]

Good effort

It is nice having things in manageable collections in folders, makes testing much less daunting. Portugal only has one for example

[gray badge]

I appreciate that Link is playable (completeable?) on every build I’ve tried. We have the correct priorities :p

aha, I spoke too soon. Crashes in the netherlands

[spring gate]

Yeah the Zelda knock offs are the systems biggest draws for most people I imagine, good to see them being somewhat playable already

[gray badge]

Rollerbollen (Netherlands) is a DVC game so we should probably take it out of the pack

[spring gate]

Ah, good spot. Cc @strange crater

[sinful hornet]

Try playing it elsewhere, like Spain or USA

[spring gate]

Flag it's status as DVC Required and once Elphive has updated his packs I will delete the entry

[sinful hornet]

[gray badge]

Ok, netherlands is done

[gray badge]

Yeah, it works elsewhere. But not for the Dutch

[stiff flare]

Finally, I had enough of @past crag’s shenanigans!

[gray badge]

We did it!

https://tenor.com/2wng.gif

[spring gate]

Basketcase is Norwegian...

[gray badge]

Forgive me, I was educated in America

[spring gate]

It's fine, I imagine all US maps of Europe just have "Here be Trolls" written on it, and that's accurate enough.

[terse flare]

Ah well. Ok. My real name is André Zeps and I've spent most of my life around the area of Dortmund. I think that city is big enough to be known by most people here, as the football club BVB has its residence here. I was born in 1989 and my father hated MS-DOS. This is why we had quite a number of Amiga systems in the house. Even during the times, the Amiga was on its decline, I've spent a lot of time with it. After my Amiga I switched directly to N64 when it comes to gaming and PC when it comes to tinkering. I've learned some Amiga Basic (which sucks) and was curious about programming very early on. After school I decided to study computer science at the university of applied science of Dortmund. I went with the curriculum for embedded programming. Eventually we had a lesson about FPGAs and I got hooked. It was at that time when I also found this here:
http://blog.retroleum.co.uk/electronics-articles/previous/
I got a certain love for the Z80, for programming and for FPGAs and for video synthesis. In the end I did a lot of things. Not everything was published on the Internet however. I was afraid of humans and had a certain fear everyone might steal my code and sell it for money. Even now, not everything I've build is on the Internet as some of the source code is in really bad shape or the project just became obsolete.
I got my MiSTer during COVID on the Amiga 37 fair in Mönchengladbach in November 2022. I loved it instantly. I work full time as an embedded software engineer for automotive software.

[stiff flare]

That’s the joke!

[past crag]

we have a cd-i channel? wow. cool. ok... goodbye now

[stiff flare]

damnit, foiled again

[glacial sonnet]

Ported Turrican on FPGA CD-i core would be out of this world

[spring gate]

Are you looking at audio now Slamy, or are there other things you want to look at first?

[terse flare]

I'm looking at audio for the past days, yes. It's a lot to type, so please no pushy pushy.🤣

[spring gate]

Absolutely not, please take your time and I hope nobody makes you feel pressured at all. I think everyone is just excited that you have pulled this together so quickly and is enjoying hearing about, and seeing, your progress 🙂

I imagine getting audio working will take a fair bit of time, that can't be straightforward

With the library of software on the CDi we aren't short of things to try out and test right now, that's for sure 🙂

[terse flare]

I really have to be careful not to burn myself out. My friends and colleagues at work already brought this up. They are worrying that I spend too much time on this project and don't take my time to relax. The worst thing about this is that they are right. It became an addiction. It hasn't yet got too much control over me. I still visit my sports club and still visit family and go to work. I just have to be careful.
Everytime the core does something new, It's like getting a needle with drugs injected.

[radiant minnow]

Simply enjoy the process, don't hurry up at all. If it's not fun, it's not worth it 🙂

[spring gate]

100%, your health and happiness are the most important things, make sure you are prioritising those. You don't owe anyone anything, just take your time and enjoy doing it. 🙂

[terse flare]

I do enjoy doing it. Especially adding cool new features. If this wasn't fun, I wouldn't do it

[radiant minnow]

I know that feeling, I did some low-level GNU/Linux graphics backend work and seeing a backend draw something on screen is truly like a drug. You end up needing more and more..

My trick was/is to have "computer-less days", entire days where I go to the wilderness with friends to walk and talk, have dinner outside, and not touching a computer in all day.

Then the next day after a computer-less day, I can code and experiment and I feel healthy and happy about it

[terse flare]

It also helps to have frequent appointments. I'm a member of the unicycle club of Bochum which forces me to get off my screens every monday and do something with body activity and social interaction.

[radiant minnow]

Ah yes, that is the way!
I am kinda addicted to running and also swimming on a mountain river nearby. Can't be more of 2-3 days without doing it, or anxiety starts building up 😄
Not exactly an appointment, but a "medical necessity".

Now, an unicycle club is something I had never hear about. Pretty sure there's none of that here in Spain, but sure sounds fun and healthy.

[terse flare]

So you switched your GNU/Linux backend drug with a sports drug? Hmmmhh That sounds like a good friend of mine which is addicted to Jujitsu and vists his sports club 4 days a week.

[terse flare]

Sports can be really boring. But the unicycle is something for your mind, your concentration, your balance.... but we really should not dive that deep. This is the CD-i thread after all

[radiant minnow]

Ah, yes, sorry, of course 🙂

[strange crater]

Updated.

[lunar nexus]

@spring gate @terse flare Not next week, but the week after, I'm off work all week. Whatever is the latest build by then, I'll go through all the gaps on the spreadsheet

[spring gate]

Nice one. If you are interested in checking non game stuff as well we should have another organised pack by then, although understand non game stuff isn't everyone's cup of tea 🙂

[bronze umbra]

arguably the CD-i is the unicycle of consoles

[glacial sonnet]

that's one way to put it LOL

[terse flare]

I can hear to this all day. 4 Bit XA Stereo 37.8kHz

This very special audio format enables the CD-i player to interleave audio with custom data.
Only every 4th CD sector contains XA audio, leaving the rest free to display some rotating discs and logo magic

[spring gate]

Oh, what discs use this audio ?

[young grotto]

not sure about cdi but almost every PSX game

[raw leaf]

4 bit 🤔

How does that not sound worse

[raw leaf]

One man band perhaps? On a unicycle

[terse flare]

I'm no audio engineer. There might be people around here that have much more knowledge on it. The base idea and also the reason for having such a weird sample rate is the additional meta data which is interleaved into the 4 bit audio samples. These are filter settings and the gain. For me it is a little bit like programming with float datatypes. The exponent is dynamic. It is assumed that during loud audio, you won't notice the quiet parts anyway. But it seems to be a sacrifice as we have not sticked with it. Maybe MP3 does something similiar. I think that reduced non audible parts of the song as well. Not all songs are in 4 bit but a lot are.
@spring gate These are my notes so far

* Tetris
    * decode_4bit_xa_unit (Philips logo and ingame)
* Zelda - Wand of Gamelon
    * decode_4bit_xa_unit (Philips logo, ingame and FMV)
* Frog Feast
    * decode_8bit_xa_unit (Menu music)
* The Apprentice
    * decode_4bit_xa_unit (Philips logo)
    * play_cdda_sector (ingame)

[raw leaf]

Interesting

[ancient garnet]

adpcm is used everywhere with these 4 bits. SNES, PSX and NDS have dedicated hardware for it(probably also others i don't know of), several other systems do it in software

[raw leaf]

Oh of course!

Adpcm

I should have thought of that

[raw leaf]

It is fascinating how deep the CD standards went, and much of it because it was, in practice, a linear recording format. So all your multimedia "channels" would need to be read on the fly from a single stream.

Long access times and essentially no RAM in the controlling computer meant you couldn't do it any other way.

[foggy tide]

I can’t get the core to work, it loads the bios menu and then when i load a game and play the screen just goes blue, am i missing something?

[steep tangle]

The other bios rom probably?

[sinful hornet]

Are you using the special mister main?

[gleaming echo]

Check the pins for the one with the MiSTer binary attached to an @ to me

[foggy tide]

Oh god, didn’t even see that

Thanks

[gleaming echo]

No problem

[gray badge]

Also you'll want to do this so that you don't have to switch back and forth #1103404843512631357 message

[foggy tide]

Thanks!

[lunar nexus]

play cdda you say? Can't wait to hear Defender Of the Crown, that seems to be playing the disk through the game, I assume streaming the cd music through.

[errant island]

@terse flare Sorry for disturbing you.
Is it possible for you to rebase your MiSTer Main file to the latest unstable version and add your changes for the CD-i to it ?
That could be much more handy for us, testers on multiple cores, without having to change the Main file on the fly.

[terse flare]

I don't have my MiSTer in reach today. This is just rebased and build again. Use at your own risk

[terse flare]

CDDA is last in priority. XA audio tracks and XA audio maps (for sfx) have higher prio

[errant island]

Thanks @terse flare

Works perfectly with CD-i and the new save state version of the SNES core

Great job

[sinful hornet]

You can also use the ini trick to specify the main you want

[errant island]

I'm lazy.

Do lazy stuff.

😁

[sinful hornet]

😆 understandable

[lunar nexus]

For the thick, ie me, can anyone compile Slamys above post into an rbf please? Thanks.

[errant island]

That's not an RBF core file, but the Main MiSTer one for supporting some CD-i formats.

[lunar nexus]

So, where do you put it? I mean does it do anything, or do you use that and compile it with the git stuff. I'm confused here!

[errant island]

Okay, I will explain bit.
It's more for testers than for general public (at the moment).

It's a file directly usable on the MiSTer system (already compiled), which goes in root directory of the SD card.
That file does the general operations of the MiSTer and provide support on how the system should access data (and more).
And if you're asking the question what it is, that implies that you should refrain touching anything at all as it requires to know what you are doing here.

But if you're interested it's at your risk completely.

[sinful hornet]

It's one of these situations if you are completely unfamiliar

But you're on the testing sheet so you must have replaced your main mister file before

[lunar nexus]

Ah I see, thanks for explaining it. I'll pass, and wait. If anyone wants all of the Phillips Redumps 2500+ disks, give us a shout. 🙂

[lunar nexus]

I just use the rbf that one of the updates pulls down. Quite good, it pulls down all of the stuff that's not part of the Mister Project, cdi, Konix etc etc.

[spring gate]

OK, so if you add this line to the bottom of your mister.ini

Add this to your MiSTer.ini
[CD-i]
main=MiSTer_CDi

Then download that new version of MiSTer main and rename it MiSTer_CDi and put it in the same folder with the other version of Main

That will mean when you boot CDi then it will use the CDi version of Main and be playable

[lunar nexus]

Ah right, I already had that added to the ini, but didn't understand why. Thanks for explaining that also!

[gray badge]

@spring gate do folks not on unstable need to update to the latest mister_cdi?

[strange crater]

I think it's only for adding support needed for another core, so that you don't need to make the change to the .ini file.

[spring gate]

Yeah, if you were using the CDi core before with that .ini trick then you don't need to do anything

[errant island]

I've asked to Slamy for a new Main MiSTer file, so we don't need to have any trick or adding lines on the ini file.
Same file for testing everything done so far on the MiSTer ecosystem.

Nice and tidy.

[wintry dust]

you really should use the ini thing

having people overwrite their main file is just going to be annoying when the updater overwrites it and they just have to go redo it (and not even realize when it happens)

the ini thing exists for this exact scenario

[errant island]

Yes, I forgot that I have my own mechanism for updating my systems and cherry-picked everything before launching an update script.

Thanks for the reminder.

[wintry dust]

also it means Slamy doesn't have to deal with rebasing main changes until they want to, since it doesn't matter if that binary doesn't have some changes related to other cores

[errant island]

Okay, I'm convinced and if that should not disturb Slamy anymore.

Mea culpa.

[spring gate]

Yeah, unless something gets added to Main that will be benefit the core then the previous CDi Main will be fine going forward while it is developed

People could presumably just do the same thing with the ini for CDi for SNES and this new unstable

[ember granite]

I've got my controller 😅

[spring gate]

Oh, does that work OK on MiSTer?

It probably does, but sometimes controllers need added to Linux

[ember granite]

Have to check it out. Didn't had the time yet, but it's pc and Switch compatible so I expect it to work with MiSTer as well.

[spring gate]

I think the recent N64 usb needed a file added to Linux but I am not an expert, but do please try it out and let us know. If it doesn't work properly it can likely be fixed but takes time to get Linux updates in and live.

[quartz crest]

it might just work as is if it's using the same vendorID and productID as a known working controller and has sane mappings

otherwise it would need either an addition to input.cpp in main to handle it's special inputs or the linux repo, depending on what stuff is missing for it to work

hopefully they did the right thing and just declare it as a generic xbox360 controller

like most do

[dawn iris]

All third party switch controller i have tested with mister has worked fine.

[strange crater]

Funnily enough, I rarely see this particular controller design for the CD-i on the second-hand market.

The only of these "paddle" controllers you see online are the ones without the lower CD control buttons, and even those seem less common on eBay now than the 3-button controllers.

[spring gate]

Be good to get any CDi paddles like these people have checked asap. Hopefully they do just work fine, but if not Main and, especially Linux, updates are only ever done periodically so once a fix is done and added it can be months until they make it to release as Main and Linux updates understandably require a lot of testing before being rolled out to everyone.

[queen arch]

Wow. There's a ton of activity in here. That's awesome.

I've been looking forward to this core since I heard about it. I've got an edited mister.ini and the correct ROMs in a directory, etc.

Loads up and I can poke around in the CDi BIOS. I'm pretty sure that means I'm ready to fool around if I feed this thing a known playable ish title.

[sly sedge]

I imagine it'll clear out pretty quickly now that you showed up. 😏

[queen arch]

I was honestly surprised this screen name was available. It's pretty awesome.

[sly sedge]

Just try not to crop dust the thread. 😄

[spring gate]

If you check the compatibility sheet in the pinned posts you can see what the current state of things is

[queen arch]

Yeah that sheet is going to be really handy.

[spring gate]

If you want to help test then just request edit access 🙂

[queen arch]

Oh I'm all for it once I make sure I haven't bunged up the installation first.

I'm going to try a known bootable game and see if I have any luck. When picking a CHD or cue file does the core automatically load said file, or do I need to hit the play button in the CDi BIOS?

[spring gate]

Hit play

[queen arch]

Dangit, archive.org is down again.

Okay, time to pull some CDI CHDs out of cold storage. Whoever is attacking archive.org is a miserable person.

For the bios files themselves, I don't see anything pinned. Is there a preferred source for them?

[sly sedge]

If you have a MAME ROMs set, it's the cdibios.zip archive. Two of the files in that zip need to be renamed.

The second pin from the bottom explains which ones.

#1103404843512631357 message

[fast jacinth]

Insanely jealous. Gonna be scouring eBay for these.

[gray badge]

Sorry, I thought we were waiting for another build. Should we be testing? If so I’ll get back at it tomorrow

[queen arch]

Bummer. I pulled the ROMs from my name set and still no dice. I would love to have edit access to help test once I get this sorted. I tried several titles which were known good and no dice.

I probably don't have something configured right. BIOS images are present, mister.ini is renamed, and I did try the other files in this thread as well.

[strange crater]

I think you might have made a mistake there. You rename the MiSTer file in the thread to MiSTer_CDi, and add the lines stated to your existing .ini.

If you’re not getting to a boot menu after starting up the core, it’s probably your ROM images. Check to make sure you have a pair matching those titles (from the MAME set), retitled to boot0.rom and boot1.rom as stated.

[queen arch]

I get a boot menu and can interact with the memory management etc. it only gives me trouble when I try to load a chd

Though I did make the previous mistake you mentioned. I must have missed that step

[strange crater]

Got it - yep, you should be good to go once you have the MiSTer executable reconfigured in the .ini. I’d recommend starting with Link: The Faces of Evil or Hotel Mario, as they’re some of the most reliable titles to boot.

[queen arch]

It's working for me now!

[queen arch]

Well, almost. I'll need to figure out why I don't have any sound, but it's getting there, so thank you!

[gray badge]

no sound in the core

it’s coming 🙂

[queen arch]

In that case I'm good to go. I'll play through some titles and report back!

[lunar nexus]

Is the archive still down? I've got the entire Philips recdump set. Anybody wants anything to try, PM me

[tacit garden]

Still down for me, but there are a myriad of options.

[sharp plume]

thanks for reminding me to grab the library asap

[lunar nexus]

Myri......Too out of date, their TOSEC is years behind, and their no-intro and redump are the same. The archive is good, especially if it's updated weekly for each set...but there's other ways, plenty of private FTPs, or dumpsites, and on here, and telegram, and strangely usenet making a comeback if you know where to look, so there's plenty of sources even if the archive doesn't come back. I'll host the mame roms, that's not a problem if need be.

[sly sedge]

MAME ROMs are still updated and hosted by the former admin of Pleasuredome via magnet links, typically on the last Wednesday of every month, in line with MAME dev release schedule.

[lunar nexus]

I know, I've everything already for 0.271 mess and mame, love a "sooner" me. 🙂 Don't get them from PD discord though. Misterwise won't that be possible? Downloading from magnet links? I don't know.

[sly sedge]

Not Discord. Website for magnet links.
There is a download utility that can grab individual content from torrents, but no, not MiSTer-friendly.

[strange crater]

If anyone needs non-DVC stuff for testing, PM me. I can assist with sourcing it.

[lunar nexus]

Same here, got the current redump set, was about 2600+ chds last time I scanned the other day.

[gray badge]

So wait. The myri… redump set is old?

[lunar nexus]

Well the file dates give it away, almost all 2022. Loads of dumps get added daily to the Redump sets.

If you got them all from there, scan them through the dat, see how many your missings are,

I mean we're a loooong way off needing them all, but it's nice to have as the core improves.

[gray badge]

oh interesting, looks like they are mirroring some IA stuff now too

[spring gate]

Anyone keen to test and has the pack of non DVC games that is/was on archive, there are still regional European titles and the betas, protos ans demos.

[gray badge]

I'll do some work tonight while I was a S P O O K Y movie

[queen arch]

I don't have all of em (I had no idea the archive was going down) but I bet I've got more than a few that haven't been tested yet.

So mad at myself I didn't save a copy of the torrent file - used JSDownloader.

I bet the torrent would still be up (provided anyone was seeding)

Honestly depressing that archive.org is down.

[spring gate]

I think the CDi redump torrent was borked, am pretty sure I tried that and it only downloaded a handful of discs and said it was done

We are getting organised packs of the redump images, currently we have one for all the non DVC games in folders for different regions etc. when archive is back we will be getting more 🙂

It is a lot more manageable than redump with is 2000+ titles in a single folder, with no organisation

[queen arch]

The raw files were also ginormous

[gray badge]

Ok, france is done. Going to go rock a baby to sleep and then I'll be back for more

🇫🇷

[sly sedge]

So many torrents are borked and unreliable on Archive. I would try several for different sets, only to find that there was no content after a certain letter of the alphabet... like they would stop after D or G with nothing present after that.

[gray badge]

Europe has been tested 🫡

[terse flare]

CDIC: Added experimental XA audio sector playback
- Added basic support for 4 Bit ADPCM
  Mono and Stereo tested
  37.8 kHz and 18.9 kHz tested
- Added MODE2 sector filter
  Fixes main menu music of Tetris
  Seems to cause compatibility issues

I had a certain ambivalence this morning whether posting this might be a good idea. The core actually became less compatible with those changes. There is a new menu option to disable the MODE2 filter which makes at least Zelda Wand of Gamelon again more playable. Tetris on the other hand requires the filter for proper music playback in the main menu. It actually plays all the songs in parallel and the CDIC only plays the selected stream of data. You can actually disable this feature and the resulting song is rather crazy.

Compared to a real CD-i which probably (yes, I actually don't know that 😦 ) upsamples the 37 kHz and 18.9 kHz audio to a common 44.1 kHz, this is currently not done in the core. It has to be added later on but until now there are other issues still to solve that are more important than audio accuracy.

[river sphinx]

That's pretty typical with core development. There is always that chaotic phase of development where as things improve other things will break.

[gleaming echo]

Thank you Slamy, Hotel Mario works with audio with MODE 2 disabled

Ok minimal game audio but the FMVs have audio

[gleaming echo]

@viral pine something happened 🙂

[viral pine]

Haha again? Everyone slow down 🤣

[gleaming echo]

Hahaha

[spring gate]

Big update!

So are we expecting that some games may not work as well as they did in the previous build?

[sinful hornet]

Just hearing that jingle with the Philips logo impressed me

Wow this Zombie Dinos game jumped in coolness by 100x with sound. It has a 90s theme song and everything

[sinful hornet]

Fantastic work!

[lunar nexus]

Sweet! Many thanks @terse flare

[sinful hornet]

It looks like Inca won't properly launch without disabling mode2 filter

I disabled the filter and it gets in game and the main menu has garbled audio but once you start the intro audio sounds ok

Oh no when the song is supposed to start its garbled again 😆

Bound to happen, I was just excited to hear the song

[terse flare]

Sadly yes, this is why I was unsure whether I even should post this. Please don't see this core release as an improvement. Please see it as a sidestep.

[sinful hornet]

I think brand new audio is definitely an improvement!

[terse flare]

I'm expecting that with disabled MODE2 filter all games that were running in the previous audio less core should also work on this one. If this is not the case, please get in touch with me.

[radiant minnow]

Impressive work, mr Turric.. I mean, Slamy! 🙂

[gleaming echo]

This is my experience so far 🙂

[spring gate]

Is the next step to identify the issues that cause things to be less stable with mode 2 being added?

[terse flare]

That would be the most mature and responsible thing to do. Sadly, I'm terribly irresponsible and I think I want to do some DYUV next to get some fresh air after breathing so much ADPCM >.<

I need to think about the best possible way to attack the issue. It might be required to record all access to the CDIC address space to compare the occuring differences. It's actually not that much. The CPU leaves the CDIC mostly alone and only access it to get data sectors and checking for life signs. The other way would be to simulate it. That will take my computer multiple hours.

[spring gate]

Do what is most fun for you to do. DYUV would be really cool, and hopefully would make the Photo CDs work which would give us testers something to get our teeth into 🙂

Might be worth posting about your CDIC issues in the dev channel, maybe someone can give some pointers

[terse flare]

There are quite some broken graphics and I'm making missing DYUV responsible for that. At least Tetris suffers from that.

[spring gate]

Oh yeah would also make lots of games work better, I just have a weird obsession with finally seeing what they all did with the Photo CD format and see what is on this elusive Ghost In The Shell disc 🙂

[merry oyster]

It's CD-iturday!?

[lunar nexus]

Odd, some things sound great, and you can see it's streaming the cd audio through great. Can anyone just try Defender Of the Crown? As that streams through the audio, but sounds awful. Now I don't know if it's something I'm doing wrong, or if one of the settings makes it better/worse. Thanks!

Haha, try 1900 Gateshead, hear the children singing Blayden Races!!

[terse flare]

Defender of the Crown is always using 8 Bit audio. For now, only the 4 bit mode is present in the core.

[fierce shoal]

My 50 Cent CD doesn't play, but 50 cents is 4 bits! </bad 1950s dad joke>

[fierce shoal]

Since MiSTer unstable took some pretty big changes, I know it sucks but could we ask for another MiSTer unstable rebuild?

Or if there's a branch, I can merge and build local, too. I should probably check Github first.

Hehe.

[terse flare]

They haven't even added features. The only fixed some buffer overflows.

https://github.com/Slamy/Main_MiSTer

[fierce shoal]

Oh, ok. This was cut after the array override stuff? I am greedy since I do captures for all things. Hehe. That's perfect, thank you!

[fierce shoal]

Oh, wow! You're on it! Thanks again!

[wintry dust]

you guys really don't need updated mains for a single core 😂

[fierce shoal]

You don't know my workflow. But in general you're right.

Asterix with sound is neat.

[spring gate]

Have you seen the pinned post about adding a line to your .ini and loading a specific version of main for CDi?

[fierce shoal]

Oh shit. I had not, thank you.

Also (HEADPHONE WARNING) this cracked me up.

[fierce shoal]

I was a fool A FOOL! Thank you all!

[sly sedge]

It's a very nice QoL feature that was added quite a while back... for the N64 core testing, if I remember correctly.

[terse flare]

Is this the type of music the edgy teens of today are listening too?

[fierce shoal]

"Have you ever tried metal.....IN THE FORM OF A QUESTION?"

[ember granite]

I love the CDi, so I did the pre-order in March I think. Together with the game Arzette. 🙂

[strange crater]

That ending lol

I think our Charlie O'Donnell needs new batteries

[nocturne vortex]

Hahaha don’t fix anything this is perfect

Directed by David Lynch

[lunar nexus]

I don't know much about this, but have you noticed the ones that are 8bit audio, even the bios boot sounds are distorted? I'd have thought it plays them at 4bit, then boots the game and plays it what it is, ie 8 bit

[terse flare]

There is no bios boot sound. The philips logo animation is of course also part of the disc. If you are referring to "Defender of the Crown", I've just started that in MAME and it always uses 8 bit audio. At least in the first 2 minutes of the game. Coming from an educated guess, I assume the game uses not many cutscenes or none at all as it is a port from a Pre-FMV game. This is why they just use 8 bit audio, like Frog Feast and Nobelia also do. I think for the Zelda Games, they had to be careful with disc space and therefore used 4 bit for ... everything?
Talking about disc space, Tetris is wasteful. Every ingame song exists twice on the disc. Once with the video material in higher sample rate and once with lower sample rate interleaved with the other songs for the main menu. Maybe they wanted to avoid seeking time.

[stray plank]

Tim & Bear at the hospital (Dutch version) works perfectly with audio! (mode2 filter disabled) Both music and speech work great. This is really cool, I never expected this core to work so well in such a small amount of time.
The only thing still failing is the coloring book part, which makes a lot of noise combined with all the images glitching, it is pretty funny to watch.

[valid cairn]

It really is incredible how quickly this went from "oh cool someone is going to give this a try" to a solid core in progress with updates and interesting technical explanations etc.

Well done Slamy! I am really enjoying following along!

https://tenor.com/view/yes-gif-24877554

[viral pine]

I’ll talk more about CD-i this fall than I’ve talked about it my whole life. And that’s pretty fun!

[steep tangle]

I was thinking exactly the same like 3 minutes ago while trying some cd-i roms.

[fierce shoal]

One of these actors was famously trouble on SNL and lead to a ton of drama behind the scenes. The other was Chevy Chase.

</s>

AMH was cursed to be on the worst era of SNL though. Poor kid.

[sick badge]

A E S T H E T I C VAPORWAVE TETRIS LIVES!

[tulip herald]

Hello guys, how do I acquire the core of Philips CD-i to test on My MisTer FPGA?

[sinful hornet]

Check the pins to this channel

[tulip herald]

Ok, obrigado! 😆

[fierce shoal]

Dodo Taschi Station.

[lunar nexus]

Regarding the Mode2 filter, I'm not seen any difference on all the things I've tried, anyone else? (Also, what is it exactly?)

[terse flare]

The MODE2 filters are able to filter out sectors from interleaved streams of data. Tetris uses it during the main menu. All songs are overlapped. At some point I've noticed that Wand of Gamelon takes quite some time to load data. After I've played back the audio of Tetris and noticed the wrongly played songs, I wanted to add those filters in hope to fix both. But it seems I've made some mistake. Zeldas loading time increases with those filters from seconds to nearly a minute. This is why I was unsure about the last release and added the debugging option to restore the previous behavior. I think I will attack that problem after adding DYUV and 8 Bit audio. But for now, I would expect the same compatibility as before when the filters are disabled.

Speaking of DYUV, I'm currently in discussion about that on the CD-i discord. I've discovered yesterday that there seems to be no emulator which does it right. There is a Verification Disc from Philips which drives the decoding algorithm to extremes and with cdiemu, mame and my real machine I have now 3 different results.

[spring gate]

That's interesting, does your actual CDi handle the disc "properly"? I assume this is a series of test patterns?

[terse flare]

Good old moondandy. Always asking the uncomfortable questions. This information was discovered yesterday before bed time when a person there told me about that test. I was so excited to see that. I don't really know actually which interpretation is right. My CD-i was connected to the CRT and that might cause some issues with the gamma curve. See for yourself.
The left one is from MAME. The right one is from cdiemu.

This is the curious pattern I'm planning to do more research on. It looks different on all three machines. Left is MAME, center is cdiemu and the right is a real CD-i 210/20

As Verilog is really hard with math I'm planning to fix the algorithm according to the specification in MAME to investigate this faster. I already know that the decoder is not to spec. My hopes are high that fixing this will provide the real result. And if not... this would be scary.

[spring gate]

Hah, sorry for putting you on the spot. 🙂

That's really interesting, especially the first test that is so different between Mame and cdiemu.

[young grotto]

thats fascinating

[strange crater]

I have a CD-i 910 and a 220/37. Would it help if I did some captures from my hardware with the Verification Disc?

[viral pine]

CD-i sound vid in 10 min

[charred dirge]

is there a bios required for the CD-i ?

[strange crater]

Yep - you can find it as part of the MAME set. Rename the BIOS files to boot0.rom and boot1.rom as per the pinned comments.

[charred dirge]

ok thanks

[charred dirge]

Bacon keep those videos coming dude

[viral pine]

I’ll keep making them if everyone keeps watching them

[charred dirge]

🙂

[sharp plume]

Pardon the ignorance.... can I get a cdi library size check?

I found one that is everything at like 550gb

[gray badge]

Sounds like that’s everything. You want the no-DVC collection (DVC doesn’t work on the core yet)

[fierce shoal]

Oh hey...I remember that. The foam was being aspirated because it dried out or something. Which is mildly terrifying if you need one of those machines to breathe at night.

[viral pine]

They had one job. And it couldn’t even play Thunder in Paradise

[merry oyster]

It's totally just the handful of us in this thread watching and rewatching them over and over to keep the dream alive!

[viral pine]

Well they are doing better than I expected. I assumed the second vid would die hard and I’d hang them up

[strange crater]

Makes sense. A mix of those late night infomercials making it a forbidden oddity, the Animation Magic Nintendo titles keeping it relevant in meme culture, and the volatility of the hardware giving it a preservation & archival angle.

[sinful hornet]

That sounds like the description for the ultimate retro console

[lunar nexus]

Yeah, the Redump set has 2241 CHDs as of the last week when I scanned it and is about that size

[pale ivy]

I watched @viral pine 's latest video and it is amazing how far along this core is

[gentle ember]

If this core gets to even 90% compatibility and has DVC then it will be the greatest technical achievement for the Mister yet! Heck, emulation in general. Many have tried and failed for decades to get the whole package to work in any form. Very excited for this core!

[viral pine]

who knew! Just goes to show I am still bad at predicting these things haha

[ionic island]

easy there kiddo

[sharp plume]

Thank ya

[iron valley]

Is the October 3rd version of the CD-i core the latest, that has sound, or was it released after that and taken down?

[gray badge]

#1103404843512631357 message is the latest

@stiff flare can you pin that? ^^

[iron valley]

Ah, thank you!

[stiff flare]

Wait

[stiff flare]

Sorry

[gray badge]

Thanks 🙂

[stiff flare]

CDi is awesome and so are you thank you

[gentle ember]

It will cure world hunger and bring peace to all nations.

[spring gate]

Well you will be able to read about the world on CDi encyclopedias soon, so guess that's the first step there

[finite portal]

I'm personally looking forward to using my MiSTer for Step Aerobics.

[raw leaf]

So I heard this core will cure my snoring

[lunar nexus]

There's also The Naked Gun.....and several porn titles. I'll check them out, purely for research you understand. 🙂

[spring gate]

Alas, those all need DVC

[pale ivy]

And that isn't gonna be possible?

[spring gate]

That is a question for once we have a fully working CDi core. It is like asking if we will have a 32x when someone is just working on a Megadrive core. DVC is probably more complex than a base CDi. Let's wait and see. 🙂

[fierce shoal]

I think you just underestimated how many people worked at Burger King.

[viral pine]

I don’t acknowledge BKs existence. The lowest rung of the fast food ladder

A bar so low you could stub your toe on it

[fierce shoal]

How can you say that with a straight face when In & Out exists. At least Burger King advertises what they sell. Me an' mah droogs was on the dole and off the wagon and lookin for a little bit of that ultra violence. We was peckish, so we thought we'd pop in for a bit of the ol' In & Out. They gave us sandwiches, mate.

But you're right. Burger King isn't very good. Hungry Jack's, on the other hand... 🐨 🇦🇺

[gray badge]

in and out is fantastic if you eat it at in and out. it has a half life of about 3 minutes

[fierce shoal]

I have been dragged to an I&O probably 20 times by people who want to show me LA. It's never been worth the price and I'd honestly rather have McDonald's. Pink's is legit, though. And Ralph's shocked me. That place has a great deli (at least the Santa Monica location).

I&O would be fine if it wasn't pumped up so much.

[wintry dust]

california people feeding you in&out is 400x better than california people taking you to 'the good local pizza place'

[fierce shoal]

In Seattle we have Dick's and it's like 'Oh, everything's closed. I guess we could go eat at Dick's.'

[gray badge]

California is a pizza desert

[fierce shoal]

California...good pizza... I've never seen those words in that order before.

😉

Agreed hard.

Great Hot Pot though. Stellar even.

[gray badge]

I miss Rubios and stone fire grill. neither of which are worth living in LA again

[fierce shoal]

There's a really good chicken place in LA, but I can't remember the name.

[gray badge]

I do think Californians holding in and out in such high regard is silly. It’s fine, but so is steak and shake

[fierce shoal]

NYC was truly the pinnacle of eating out in my experience. There was some definite over promising, but overall it met or exceeded. And, sadly, Las Vegas, too. But I hate everything else about going to Vegas. I don't gamble. Every good show is sold out. It's something like the surface temperature of a red hot ball of nickel.

Steak and Shake was pretty good!

[gray badge]

(I think it’s at least as good as in and out, but my wife would kill me for saying that out loud)

I like in and out a lot when you eat there. the fries don’t have a chance to turn into popsicles

[fierce shoal]

If another person tells me 'nah, bro, you just ordered it wrong' when I say I don't want to go there ... I'm probably just going to say 'yeah, you're right' and go along with it because I don't like conflict. But...

[viral pine]

Dave Thomas perfected fast food. Everyone else can go home

[fierce shoal]

The kind of patty you can draw a graph with. That's America's burger... (I do like their potatoes and chili).

[rugged panther]

How's the In N Out core doing

[gray badge]

It was good for about 3 minutes

[queen arch]

This new core is impressively good for some titles.

[fierce shoal]

<TODO: Include AnimalStyle.h in hidden menu options>

One would assume since it's menu it'd be on the HPS.

[stone wing]

ok so i got to the cdi menu but it won't load any of the games? it just goes to a solid blue screen

if anyone knows what i'm missing please tell me

[gray badge]

did you grab the new mister main?

Grab this: #1103404843512631357 message

Rename it to “MiSTer_CDi

Then do this: #1103404843512631357 message

also, make sure you have all the appropriate bios files

[lunar nexus]

Is the released rbf from a few days later better surely? Than the mister main from the 10th? Thanks.

[south urchin]

The build TheJesusFish linked has additions for cd-i that I dont believe are in the latest unstable
Follow the instructions and the MiSTer will use the older/CD-i version only for the CD-i core

[stiff flare]

I am sad to say but there was zero CDi representation at the Nintendo Museum

[gray badge]

You need both the main and the rbf

[dawn iris]

Not sure if there is only things that Nintendo make themself. Iirc they gave only the license in conjunction with an other deal that was not happen.

Phillips hasn’t done much marketing for the Nintendo games, so no real advantage from them in the old days.

[stiff flare]

Yeah I wasn’t really expecting it but it would’ve been neat haha

[south urchin]

theme parks, museums, one day their marketing dept. will get around to hotel mario

what % of the place is the gift shop?

[stiff flare]

Uhhh, hard to say. Overall the museum isn’t very big, takes up maybe half the actual real estate.

It’s basically split up into five distinct sections:

1. Entrance area + shop
2. Museum on the 2nd floor
3. Interactive Exhibits on 1st floor
4. Workshops
5. Hatena Burger

I guess 6 if you count the courtyard

[sly sedge]

Why would you not count the courtyard??

[glacial sonnet]

Yeah they were too busy setting up the emulators for their games

[hoary cliff]

Quick question, Setting this core up, I'm fully updated with Update_All, and I've got the RBF file in the cores folder as well as the two required bios files renamed as boot0 and boot1, Are these the only files required for the core? Just trying to download and setup files for when I get home from work to test. THANKS!

[sinful hornet]

Make sure you have the alternate mister file

[dawn iris]

Look at the 📌 messages in this channel

[stone wing]

Messed that up I guess thanks

[strange crater]

And the pinned edits to the MiSTer.ini.

[spring gate]

Any new discoveries on the DYUV front?

[terse flare]

This week, I had small difficulties to focus. So not much progress was made. I've sadly stumbled upon an issue I'm trying to resolve by talking to the people on the CD-i Discord. The weird blue colors in the previously posted pictures are not caused by a DYUV issue. In fact DYUV works ... ok... in MAME I guess. However, by using this "Validation Disc" I've noticed a misbehavior shared by my core and MAME which really sucks. These pictures are actually not DYUV but instead interleaved DYUV and CLUT8 to verify for equalness. It is clever to do that. Having multiple video modes to check whether the output is the same. Now, the problem I'm facing for 2 days is that the color lookup table for the CLUT plane is not as expected. It just is the same palette which was used in the menu before starting the test. This is really an issue. I've expected to just add DYUV and call it a day but never expected to have a finding like this during the process. Right now I have to decide which path to take. I can ignore that for now but I feel this is like a sword of Damocles.

[spring gate]

That is interesting. If I am understanding this right, if you were to "just" add DYUV then shapes would render OK but the colours would be off?

[terse flare]

Ah. This is completly unrelated. I've tried the Validation disc to have some footage to test DYUV against only to discover that the colors of CLUT8 are wrong. The latter is yet another video mode.

The colours are only off in this application. But it would help to know why this happens. Also for some reason, DYUV works in Tetris but not in Zelda's Adventure for example. This is also a yet open question.

[spring gate]

-as a sidebar, would Elphive's offer to check how the validation disc looks on his two consoles be useful?

[terse flare]

I would assume that it looks the same on his real CD-i as on my real CD-i. It would be weird if not... The closed source emulator cdiemu also doesn't have that problem. Maybe I can squeeze something out of the developer

[radiant minnow]

Some emu devs (even if I fail to understand why would anybody go all the way and code an emulator just to keep the source closed...) are very willing to give information even if the emulators are closed, @terse flare
I am almost sure he will answer your questions very gladly.

[terse flare]

I'm already asking the questions. I've also confronted him on sunday that his results of either DYUV or CLUT8 are not conforming to hardware. He will probably answer my questions.

[spring gate]

Hopefully the emulator guy can help, it does seem an odd and complex situation.

Have you checked a Karaoke disc or Photo CD discs? Karaoke discs seem to have very basic visuals and Photo CDs are so basic they could be used as test discs. May be good as test cases for checking things rather than a game where there is more going on.

[terse flare]

Well, this is why the Validation disc was a good candidate. It just shows pictures without much else 😄

[spring gate]

May be worth having a few other easy to assess test discs, it might be that getting other things to look right is a good stepping stone to getting the validation disc perfect. I know from other systems validation discs can push things to extremes that are very hard to get perfect and may not be fully noticeable in the real world. If it is anything like calibration/verification discs for TVs, and Blu Ray players a lot of set ups you will never get the test patterns perfect but will look fine for watching films. Not sure if that is a valid comparison here, but it jumped to mind

Some of our mature cores still fail a few verification tests, but play games without issues - the Master System core springs to mind, it fails a couple of visual tests but (probably) isn't noticeable at all in games, certainly in no glaringly obvious way

[quartz crest]

some people are embarassed about their code, some people don't want to field all the emails from people trying to make contributions, etc... depends on the person

i personally don't like the concept of closed source emulators in principle, but if they are willing to share information it's not all bad i guess

[terse flare]

Photo discs are more difficult than games. They use interlacing. >.< We don't have that ... yet.

[spring gate]

Hah, it is never straight forward is it? 🙂

[strange crater]

Ran the verification disc just to be sure - looks about the same as your reference player. (Ignore the red-blue bars in the middle on the second image - that’s an NTSC artifact due to the close vertical lines together, and this demo wasn’t made with NTSC color compression artifacts in mind.)

[indigo tartan]

sorry but where to take this verification disc please ?

[errant island]

No romsites links/DLs, no direct mention of sites for your question.

[terse flare]

In that case I've removed my answer to follow the rules.

[errant island]

I'm compiling your last changes from yesterday, testing time.

I was just curious.

[terse flare]

Ah I was sleepy. I should not have uploaded that to github. I was also unsure whether to post that here. I mean, we can declare that as the core for yesterday. Some things are working with that. But it's not compliant to the correct DYUV decoding algorithm according to datasheet.

[errant island]

Okay, I will refrain to upload and take all the time you need/want.

[terse flare]

I wanted to correct some mistakes today.

[errant island]

At least, Tetris is displaying better.

[terse flare]

The intro of Zelda's Adventure is quite broken. There seem to be some effects at work that are missing in the core yet.

This adds DYUV to both video planes. The results are comparable to what MAME and cdiemu does. The implementation follows the green book but shows differences compared to real CD-i 210/20 hardware. I don't yet know where those differences come from. The CD-i discord emulation group is also notified about this discrepancy. You will not notice those differences on normal pictures. It is written: Only the Validation Disc is capable of showing that something is off. As DYUV is only intended for "natural pictures" even pixel peepers will not notice that.

Compared to what @errant island has compiled by themselves, this release also has interpolation on the V color component (and the pixel data is no longer shifted one pixel to the right.)🫠

[terse flare]

Ooff. The new core already has regressions. Hotel Mario has invisible graphics now. I wanted to test that game specifically as I remembered that the intro logo screen was broken and assumed it might have been related to DYUV. But well. It is now invisible as well.

[terse flare]

There is a correlation between the intro of Zelda's Adventure showing black screens and Hotel Mario not showing anything at all. I think I found the issue for the regression in Hotel Mario. But I'm confident that something is still not right. This hotfix shall at least restore Hote Mario and other games that have the same issue and are easy to fix. Concerning Zelda's Adventure, I assume that game makes use of the additive video mixer which is not yet implemented. A proper fix should include both. This is why this is not yet an official release.... Also I don't even know how to name a core if there are two releases a day....

[river sphinx]

No, it's actually a secret hard mode in Hotel Mario. It's a feature.

[sinful hornet]

I think Robert would name it the date as usual and add a version number at the end like _2

[unreal sparrow]

Thank you for your time on this core 👍

[sinful hornet]

An improvement 😆 kinda creepy

In game still has some corrupted graphics but also a lot of improvements from last I saw

Caesars world of gambling looks and sounds great now!

[shy fossil]

Thank you Slamy

[sly sedge]

"I think Robert would name it the date as usual and add a version number at the end like _2"
Robert would also upload test cores with a brief description in the file name regarding what it added/fixed.

[sinful hornet]

Jeopardy seems unstable to me, anyone else mind checking it?

It occasionally goes black with a red selector on screen. Probably not a big deal at this point

Slamy, I'm noticing while messing around with jeopardy that when I choose reset in the osd and hit the play button again it loads me directly back to where I was in game. Is this expected?

Mystic Midway looks like it may have regressed to an all blue screen

[rugged panther]

Invisible graphics? I call that hard mode 💪

[rugged panther]

Dammit

[sinful hornet]

Wow that Girls Club intro is even more wild with sound. Whole 90s theme song and everything

[gleaming echo]

I am working today, has anyone tried any of the Karaoke Discs from Europe on the DYUV core?

[merry oyster]

New core update!?

CD-i can't wait to try it out today!

[gleaming echo]

I wish I could try it out lol

I am working today and then busy tomorrow for most of the day

[merry oyster]

I think this calls for "Bring your MiSTer to work day"!

[gleaming echo]

I wish I could lol

I can't wait for Taki Udon to release the portable one then I can take that into work with me xD

[terse flare]

Jeopardy was one of those games which never worked for me on the core. I don't know in which version it worked for you. Some time ago a person posted a very funny video with funny audio. It was like comedy. It never went that far for me. If you could pinpoint on which version it worked and when it regressed, that would help.
I usually try to avoid looking into games thrown at me. I know that a lot is broken. Looking at other broken things doesn't always help.

[spring gate]

Looks like some signs of life on some of the Photo CDs 🙂

That's the Ghost In The Shell one, so you can now see the intro/menu image, not loading pics yet

[terse flare]

I recently was thinking about you. There was this guy here who created new Photo CDs with very old software.
https://youtu.be/ouIEFhn_l40

[terse flare]

I've actually tested the Philips Sample Photo CD. That worked but sadly used interlacing and looked awful

[spring gate]

Hah, interesting, will give that a watch 🙂

Nice to see incremental improvements, obviously don't have interlaced support so actual images not loading, but cool to see that first menu image now looking like it should

[spring gate]

We don't have CD Audio support in the core yet, so no music on Karaoke discs yet. I fired up the sole Japanese disc I have on my SD and it still shows garbled graphics behind the music note cursor, so European discs probably in the same situation

[gleaming echo]

You say that, the EU ones hang very quick but in the 4 bit audio core it started to play the song

[spring gate]

Oh, Interesting

[gleaming echo]

So when a certain archive comes back online look for Karaoke Klassics and then pick a song and select preview and you will get like half a second of the song (possible seek timing issue?)

[terse flare]

I have to admit that a number of games still have audio issues. Hotel Mario and Wand of Gamelon both have no ingame music. The seek times are not yet simulated at all. A requested sector is delivered as soon as the next sector comes by. So only the sector frequency is simulated.

[sinful hornet]

Gotcha. I know you had done work with core resets and wasn't sure if it might be related to that

[gleaming echo]

This makes sense, take your time with the core, add what you want when you want, I was just responding to moondandy 🙂 you are doing an amazing job buddy

[spring gate]

Do Hotel Mario and Wand if Gamelon use 4bit audio?

[terse flare]

The last time I've traced calls in MAME, yes they do... or do they? Let me check again. That goes quick.

@spring gate Yes, both Hotel Mario and Wand of Gamelon use 4bit audio during the levels. The title screens of both games also do and are working in the core. It might be caused by some misbehaviour of the mode2 filter. If you remember I avoided working on that evil thing to make some DYUV shenanigans. This might be something to look at next with a fresh mind.

[spring gate]

Ah, that's interesting, I was curious if maybe it was using 8bit audio for some parts. Just you work on what you want to, don't let any of our excited chatter sway you one way or another. 🙂

[clever viper]

@terse flare Thank you for making this core! I've never actually played CD-i before (only seen parody YouTube videos) - this is AMAZING and a fun reminder of the early 90s when Interactive CD-ROM was the creme de la creme tech 😎

[gleaming echo]

Do whichever suits you best 🙂

[strange crater]

I've been running into a dark blue screen on Hotel Mario after the Philips logo since the 10.12 build.

I've also run into a black screen when trying to enter any level on either of the Zelda games.

[terse flare]

Please set "Disable MODE2 Filter" to Yes and save that for now.

[strange crater]

Yep, that fixed it. Thanks!

[merry oyster]

This is the new Zelda game that everyone's been playing lately right?

[terse flare]

I don't get this game. It's slow. And Ganon is spelled Gannon in the intro. The loading times are atrocious on a real CD-i. It will hopefully profit from an overclocked CD-i.

[river sphinx]

But can you kill enemies by chucking furniture?

[merry oyster]

https://tenor.com/view/robert-downey-jr-tony-stark-gif-26471287

[errant island]

Expensive and scalpers, these are the reasons for that game.

Even the GB homebrew remake is more fun than that.

[gleaming echo]

@viral pine did you see there was a new core today??

[viral pine]

I did not

Not in pins?

[gleaming echo]

Not yet

[gleaming echo]

#1103404843512631357 message

[spring gate]

Did you get a chance to check if this works OK on MiSTer?

[slim geode]

I got a couple myself. For whatever reason I can't map the home button, but otherwise it works 👍

[spring gate]

Hmm, wonder why that is

[noble talon]

so outside of tetris and the nintendo/philips stuff, what are some other games worth checking out?

[strange crater]

That currently work on the core, or just in general?

[noble talon]

in general

I've never spent much time looking at the library so just kind curious what else is out there

[strange crater]

Quite a few. Zenith, Defender of the Crown, Voyeur, L’affaire Morlov, Whack-A-Bubble, Laser Lords, Burn:Cycle, Kether, Inca - the list goes on.

[gray badge]

Burn:Cycle ❤️

[noble talon]

Also saw Flashback was available

[strange crater]

Yeah, there’s a lot of pretty excellent multiplatform ports on the CD-i. Flashback, Micro Machines, Pac-Panic, and Myst definitely come to mind, alongside The 7th Guest, BrainDead 13, Kingdom 1 & 2, and the ALG titles with the DVC.

There’s also Lost Eden, which is a super underrated point-and-click by Cryo.

[noble talon]

I'll definitely be checking some of that out as more things start to work on the core, thanks for giving me lots of stuff to look into 👍 really appreciate it

[raw leaf]

Deepens the gameplay

[raw leaf]

This looks terrifying enough for me to file a bug

[terse flare]

Some low hanging fruits.

MCD212: Fixed some Transparency Control Register settings
        Ignored transparency color key matching for DYUV mode.
        Added a "Jeopardy Hack" in case an invalid transparency mode is used.
MCD212: Added CLUT4 mode
        This is the high resolution mode of the CD-i with only 16 colors.
        Fixes visuals of "Validation Disc" menu
        Fixes noise pixels of "Photo CD Sample Disc"
MCD212: Added additive color mixer
        Fixes intro cutscene in "Zelda's Adventure"

[gleaming echo]

Nice Slamy 🙂

@viral pine another new core drop xD

[valid onyx]

With the latest pinned Mister (properly renamed to MiSTer_CDi) and the very latest core, having the mode 2 filter option set to yes (or no, doesn't seem to matter much), I'm observing a few hangs when switching CD's with games running. It seems more reliable when I first reset, and then swap, but even then, it tends to sometimes hang so hard I need to power cycle the mister. I did not have that experience with an older core (one of the ones before sound got added). Might be a fluke or a known issue, but I thought I'd report it.

My previous build that I tested with, was 24th of september.

[gleaming echo]

The core is still not completely stable and still highly WIP, I am sure Slamy will completely fix the reset logic closer to the official release, adding new features and components is bound to break other things, as per every other WIP core it is probably safer to just reload core when changing games

[valid onyx]

I'm fully aware 🙂 And very happy with all the work Slamy is volunteering for our enjoyment 🙂 My own small contribution can only be testing and reporting my findings; I wasn't complaining, if it came across as such 🙂

[gleaming echo]

🙂 yeah I wasn't having a go buddy 🙂

[sinful hornet]

Vegas Girls looks mostly better now 👍

Interesting how this and strip poker start with password screens

FYI strip poker password is queen, queen, queen, queen, king

The Vegas girls password is 1 2 3 4 🤣

Nfl trivia is looking really good now

The nfl trivia is all like two decades before anything I'm familiar with

[south urchin]

Are you telling us that all a kid needs to do is download Mr fusion and imaging software, flash the image, let the mister expand the filesystem, run update all, download and transfer a redump cd-i set, bios, the core and custom main, configure their ini, select from countless video filter and shadowmask combinations, load the game and enter that password

And then they can see partial nudity. On the internet?

[gray badge]

hey now, don’t mock the power of nudity. I literally learned how to navigate DOS because my dad had a copy of Strip Poker 3 and I wanted to play it without him knowing

[finite portal]

It's true. My friend and I sat stumped in front of the questions for Leisure Suit Larry on the Tandy 1000 when we were 9 years old.

[spring gate]

This is actually really useful info! We should add this to the info tab on the testing sheet. Are there any other titles that have passwords like this?

[errant island]

Maybe Voyeur (II) and Pleasures of S**

Adult access code: 3333 for Voyeur

[sinful hornet]

😆

[spring gate]

Have added the 3 posted, thanks chaps

If there are others be good to get those logged

[errant island]

Preservation needs sometimes from you to keep your composure and be professional, even with those titles.

[spring gate]

Loving for a Lifetime (Dutch: Sex, je lust en je leven)
6969
Girls - Serge Jacques
019
Strip Poker Live
QQQQK
Uncover featuring Tatjana
1492 - Hereafter you must enter your own code. If you forgot this, just erase the appropriate entry from the Memory or Storage screens in the player shell.
Voyeur
3333 - Hereafter you have the option to enter your own code. If you forgot this, just erase the appropriate entry from the Memory or Storage screens in the player shell.
Vegas Girls
1234

http://www.icdia.co.uk/faq/cdifaq8.html#8.4

[sinful hornet]

Is it weird these password screens existed?

Were any of these esrb/pegi rated?

[strange crater]

Yeah, it’s a bit strange. The CD-i actually predates the ESRB rating system by a few years - the multimedia title “The Pleasure of Sex” was actually the first title rated as AO by the ESRB.

They marketed this system equally to kids and adults, so I think these were an attempt by Philips to protect kids from playing adult titles.

That being said, I find Voyeur’s access code a bit funny. All things considered, it’s not that adult in terms of content, especially these days.

[sinful hornet]

Some cool history there

[spring gate]

It might be trivial for someone who knows how to make cheat files for these titles that skip the screen or auto fill them, someone did make some CDi cheats

https://gamehacking.org/system/cdi

[terse flare]

"I'm observing a few hangs when switching CD's with games running." I cannot read this without laughing. Please consider what you are doing. In a real CD-i system there is a disc spinning. You just quantum teleport that disc out while teleporting another disc in. This is exactly what you are doing to the core. There is not even a laser lens out of focus while doing so.
In a real CD-i, the tray has to be opened first and the applications can exit gracefully. This is what the core will have to emulate later on. There is a TODO in my list about this problem but it is at the end of the backlog near NvRAM storage.

[valid onyx]

Yeah, when you phrase it like that... 🙂 True 🙂 I just hadn't expected it to hang the entire mister 🙂 But: don't start changing your todo list based on my random pushing buttons 🙂

[gleaming echo]

Ok I checked the Karaoke discs that I have and the images look right now but as it is about to play the song it throws a disc may be dirty screen, I am sure these will get fixed with the seek fix update when it comes 🙂

it counts down the time properly now tho

[spring gate]

Did the BIOS date issue get sorted? I can't remember the outcome of that

[gleaming echo]

You can change it all fine yeah but it will not save it so everytime you restart the core it will drop back to default

[spring gate]

Cool, that's good you can set it

I am sure at some point it will be hooked up to RTC but there is no rush on that. Do any discs make use of the date? (Ignoring BGM discs which have weird date locking)

[gleaming echo]

I wouldn't know bro sorry

This core is my first real way I have played around with a CD-i

Btw moondandy can you pin today's build?

[spring gate]

I have it already in the WIP DB if anyone uses that to grab the latest builds

[gleaming echo]

I always manually install WIP cores from whichever channel it gets posted to 🙂

[terse flare]

The issue was fixed with the September 10th release. It was caused by all DIVU instructions causing a division by zero. This also means that a CD-i can just boot fine without dividing even once.

[spring gate]

Nice one

It's really fun seeing all these little incremental updates coming 🙂

[terse flare]

I might know how you feel. You are feeling maybe like how I felt a few months ago in eager anticipation when Robert will amaze us again. I felt really happy when Blast Corps was running. Test build after test build. Testing games and seeing how pixels are slowly taking shape to form what they are supposed to look like. It's like electronic clay in a pottery. It started as a lump slowly becoming a vase the longer you work on the lump of clay.

Though it might be debatable if the CD-i was a vase to begin with. Probably not a ming vase.

[spring gate]

Well I don't think anyone would argue the CDi is a superior console to the N64, but where as pretty much everyone has played, or owned, an N64 there are very few who have even used a CDi, let alone properly explored the library. So you my friend are taking us on a journey down a road far fewer have travelled. 🙂

[gleaming echo]

And what a road it is so thank you so much for all your hard work for us Slamy 🙂

[slim geode]

Gave the new build a quick test when I put it on the MiSTer, I think I found a regression. The menu for P.A.W.S. loaded with some glitchy graphics on a previous build (I hadn't updated in a bit so it was still the build that added the MODE2 filter option), but on today's build the menu is now totally black with just the cursor. That said, Tetris looks great 👍

[terse flare]

Menu black with just the cursor is something similar to Hotel Mario and even Jeopardy. I've touched lots of the color mixing in the last days. This is something I can look at in the next days. Thanks for telling me. Fixing graphics feels a little bit easier than fixing audio and CD stuff.

[slim geode]

Decided to try another game from the list, Tangram, and I suspect it's having a similar issue. During the gameplay copies of the menu take over the screen unless you have a piece collected. The cursor is still visible so you can kinda play around it, though 😂

Piece not selected vs piece selected

Also I recommend setting music to fusion

[gleaming echo]

Slamy, just to let you know I have left Zelda's Adventure running for about 2 - 3 hours letting it loop around and no hangs or crashes at all 🙂

[terse flare]

I've analyzed both cases. Both P.A.W.S. and Tangram make use of Regions. The SNES - where it is called "Windows" - was popular for it. On a line by line basis a shape can be described which then is used for mixing and transparency. This feature is not yet in the core as I've not seen it so far expect maybe on the highscore screen of "The Apprentice". I've put it on my list of TODOs.

[slim geode]

You can rely on me to find this sort of stuff. Between weird nostalgia (played P.A.W.S. as a kid at my dad's house, pretty sure it was the Mac version, but he's the kind of guy that would have a CD-i) and my crippling addiction to puzzle games I tend to dig into odd corners of console libraries. I remember when I was playing with the WIP PlayStation core and reported a regression to Robert because Tetris with Cardcaptor Sakura started crashing 😂

[young grotto]

we need a day like saturnsday but for CDI 🤔 cdFriday ?

[slim geode]

Instead of TGIF it's CDiF

[orchid sapphire]

anyday can be cdiday

[foggy tide]

Having issues with the CD-i core on the new version, if i only have a single CHD file in a lettered folder it won't go into the folder in the menu it just loads whatever game is in there and boots me back to the main menu part, i don't actually get to select the file

is that a pretty normal mister thing?

[young grotto]

thats normal behavior for a folder with one cdimage inside

[foggy tide]

okay

cool

thanks

disregard then

[viral pine]

CD-i time on #share-media

[valid onyx]

What is that channel? It says no access for me, haven't enlisted for All The Channels 🙂 BTW: fan of your vids! Thanks :

[whole thicket]

Oh man, just tried out my first CD-i games ever…wow they are so awful they’re good. Love the janky zelda and mario FMVs.

Not gonna lie, Id have been pissed as a kid if id picked this over an SNES or Sega Genesis

Every game is so bad…the best ones are like SDK demos

Granted Ive only played 5 or 6 games so far. But from a preservation standpoint Im glad we’re getting this core.