A little to the East of Hasselt, in the 'Wetenschapspark' in the Belgian city 'Diepenbeek', PIMC (Philips Interactive Media Centre) was located. It was mentioned in CD-i Magazine. From the local N702 you can snap a view of the old building. CD-i member Kuro worked here in the past and he shares some memories with us: "Testing was done at customer's request. We offered a couple of standard packages, like compatibility on a few players and cartridge/player combinations, input devices etc, or the full suite of all players etc... Sometimes customers wanted only a limited test, like "test those a ..read more

  Do you remember when we shared the prototype of Si Balla on CD-i? At that time, we never heard of this disc but our community found it was released in The Netherlands as 'Dansen!' - a CD-i disc full of swinging music. Now it appears that Si Balla was in fact also released as Si Balla in Italy. Just like the Dutch version it was developed by RCS New Media in 1994.   [Source @ Interactive Dreams ..read more

Paul Clarke was one of the developers behind the CD-i first person shooter Atlantis: The Last resort and this game actually was a result of playing around with the possibility to port Doom on CD-i. Paul "In terms of DOOM on CD-i... we used to have a thing blessed by Simon Turner who ran the Home Interactive Systems Group that we worked in at PRL Redhill. That was Friday lunchtime games, and Friday afternoons people would experiment on stuff they wanted, My Friday lunchtime games stuff was playing DOOM first alone then multiplayer over (parallel?) cable with a mate. I got into using DOOM PWAD ..read more

  CD-i member Lee Storey shared with us another rare Video CD from his collection: The Guyver: Dark Hero on Video CD, released in 1994 and published by CD Vision. CD Vision was a UK publisher, releasing various Video CD's on the market. It might be, next to Polygram, the biggest European VCD publisher at the time. Of course, in Japan there was a wide range available as well from Japanese publishers, and we yet have to find our way in what has been released at that time. Even the European titles are hard to come by nowadays. released in the Philippines as Predator 3) is a 1994 American s ..read more

Recently CD-i developer TwBurn (who is the creator of CD-i homebrew game 'Nobelia') released a trailer of the game. Next to the demo which he released earlier, we can hear a few audio tracks in it. CD-i member Chris asks: Is the music in the trailer of 'Nobelia' from the CD-i game? Who was the composer and will there be a soundtrack released as well (physical or digital)? TwBurn does not have plans to do so: "There are two songs in the trailer, both are in the game (and a few more) The one during the gameplay I licensed from a game audio set and is called "Heroes" by Andy Sitkov. The one du ..read more

With the recent release of Mame 0.240, more CD-i titles are currently compatible to emulate. So it is interesting to collect a new list of compatible CD-i titles that currently work in Mame. Thanks to your input, find below the compatibility list of which CD-i games you can try with success in Mame 0.240. Of course, Mame does not yet support the Digital Video Cartridge, so any CD-i title that requires the Digital Video Cartridge does not work yet in Mame 0.240. However, if you are interested to emulate 'Digital Video on CD-i' titles (like Atlantis: The Last Resort for example), you can try C ..read more

CD-i developer The lost Boys was a rare CD-i developer who acted a bit like the 'SquareSoft' of CD-i: I liked it a lot how they let certain CD-i titles mess with the menu shell of the CD-i, trying to have one experience of the CD-i software including the menu shell and logo sequences. In their CD-i title 'Monty Python: Invasion from Planet Skyron' the intro moview features the original CD-i player shell which is ruined by the Monty Python gang in various ways: Find below the video made by CD-i member Mr Burns ..read more

If you are interested in CD-i developing and you are eager to learn more about CD-i authoring, you might be interested in these floppy disks which were used to access specific tools of the OS-9 system, originally preserved at ICDIA. For example, the disc meant to use with the CD-i 605 system contains the OS-9 system files needed to use essential utilities in the Philips CD-i OS-9 shell. It is used by going into the settings menu of the CD-i 60x and selecting 'load'. The diskette was made by manually formatting it, and copying over the OS-9 system files from the Media Mogul 2.2.1 CD. Anothe ..read more

CD-i member Laucessy found an unknown CD-i, named 'CD-Visuals', a professional CD-i described as an 'Explainer product', made by Explainer Visuals BV. It is called a sample, otherwise not much is known about this, but the preservation team is behind it to capture and dump it.  [Thanks, Laucessy ..read more

Interesting find by CD-i member Laucessy: a Philips demo disc of Stickybear: Spelling. Stickeybear was part of a series that was also released on CD-i. Subtitled 'Math, Reading, Preschool and Family Fun, four editions actually made it to CD-i. This fifth episode, named Spelling, did not make it on CD-i and remained a CD-ROM exclusive. As we know the history of Philips Media and their strategy, it's interesting to investigate the plans and progress of a CD-i version, as it was simply the strategy of Philips in Media in 1995 to simultaneously develop CD-i and CD-ROM versions.  Howeve ..read more