I worked on CD-i productions at Codim between 1994 and 1995. Codim (for some time known as SPC/Codim) was a small but important producer of CD-i titles, many under the Philips name. You probably wouldn't have heard about anything I wrote; I mostly worked on educational titles. But if you look at the small print of many Philips CD-i titles, you'll probably see the Codim name. CD-i started out as a good idea but had one major flaw: All CD-i discs had to be playable on all CD-i players. Not only did this mean that European (PAL) discs had to be playable in the USA (NTSC) but it also meant that there would never be an upgraded version of CD-i with more memory, a faster CD drive, a hard disk or a network interface (though some of those were available on the professional players). After all, why would anyone invest in a fast CD drive, more memory etc. if all discs would play in the basic system with a 1x speed drive. And why would anyone write a game that could play better in a CD-i player with more features if it was mandatory that it should also play in players that wouldn't have those features. My favorite CD-i application was: Background music. Philips had a department back then called Background Music Services (BMS). They were a competitor of Muzak (guess who won and competed the other away). Once a month, they would send a box of DAT tapes to Codim, which we recorded to the hard disk of a computer with a special Sony DSP sound card that cost thousands of dollars but could encode audio to ADPCM format in real-time. The computer had a program (programmed in MS-DOS by my predecessor) that would split the two channels (each channel had one track of music) and multiplexed the ADPCM audio into a real-time mode-2 form 2 file. The file would be part of a disc image, as well as another file with text info (such as song titles). The result was something that could be played with a CD-i player or with a special BGM player (google for the Philips BMS 3000). It could fit 4 to 8 hours of music if I recall correctly. The process of converting one pair of two DAT tapes into one disc image that would go to the factory in Germany, would take a day, and there were usually 10 disc images to be made each month. I wanted to make my own BGM CD but never got around to it. Now the only information about the format that's available on the Internet seems to come from... me. Anyway, I have good memories of working for Codim. It was a great team and we had a lot of fun together. I left because I was getting tired of doing the same thing over and over all the time. One more thing: Please stop twisting CD's inside jewel cases: if there's a bit of dirt between the case and the CD, it will make a nice perfectly round scratch that will make it unplayable.
Great story, I'm making a homebrew FMW game for the CD-i, the base model, with only 1 MB of RAM looks like the major problem to me, the extended case with additional 1.5 MB from the DVC help a lot, but most of the early games and softwares had to fit in the 1MB ram. Looks like make sounds effect and music work at the same time isn't easy at all.
@Lassi Kinnunen Maybe I should have said: the main major TECHNICAL flaw :-) I lived in the home town of Philips but I don't know anyone who owned a CD-i. I never owned one myself either. Everyone I knew already had a PC or some other computer like an Amiga. And they were just way more useful. VideoCDs took off about as much as Laser Discs, which is about as much as a lead balloon. Who wants to buy a movie that doesn't even fit on a single disc? Yes it was digital so it was robust, but the quality wasn't any better than VHS and everyone already had a VHS. VCD was a solution without a problem.
I almost like the CD-i, it just had way too many issues to be actually, well, good. My only hunt now is to try and find a development kit for the system, so I could try to make some homebrew on it without trying to reverse engineer a console I don't physically own.
I remember dad renting the CD-I and 3DO (yes renting game consoles used to be a thing) and they both were way more impressive then the genesis and snes, then he rented a playstation. you dont have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what was the new appliance in our living room a week later.
I always have liked the 3DO more than the PS, myself. I realize that's an unpopular position. I have never owned a PS, nor wanted to, since they came out in the US.
The first summer job I had as a teenager was at Burger King, and they used CD-i for their training videos. There's hundreds of undocumented discs out there for businesses.
@@Tornado1994 Great to hear someone else remembers this. Considering you kinda had to be a HUGE NERD to even realize it was a CD-i system... For me, I believe it was 1998, but also again in 1999.
Thanks for the shout out. I just uploaded them all, and removed the audio from the ones that got take down notices. Surprisingly many of them are allowed. I have a fairly complete collection of the Warner Era CD+G titles, notably missing Phoebe Snow - Something Real, so always looking out for the CD+G version of that which is apparently pretty rare! Thanks again!
My mind was blown when my mom finally let me rent the CDI (Magnavox model) from Blockbuster. I only had it for 3 days, with one game rented, but I stayed glued to that sucker the entire weekend. Cheers!
They were acquired by K-Mart. Both brands still exist, but there aren't many retail stores left. Which makes me sad - they were the best for consumer appliances.
I mean any video can be copyright striked, but I think he *meant* he would get content matched and lose monetization. Afaik, when content is matched, it doesn't give a copyright strike. It either causes the video to be unplayable, unplayable in certain regions, or will lose monetization. Copyright strikes only really happen when someone manually files a copyright claim on a video, which does indeed happen, unfortunately. Copyright strikes are obviously the one that can heavily impact your channel in a ton of ways.
Well, in a certain way, they're oddly attractive, well, they're atrocious... But you probably enjoy to see how bad they are... I happened to me back then... Watch the intro scenes, and say, "what a pile of garbage"... However, not being able to skip them, not wanting to skip them either... Some kind of sadomasochist taste... Heh...
FUNFACT: The hole in the middle of the cd/cdi is the same size of the dutch(FL) coin of 10 cents .... a choice by Philips when deciding how big the hole in the middle shoud be.
despite the memes it created, the CD-i was a pretty advanced home console for its time It had 1MB of RAM at a time where most consoles barely had 128KB of RAM.
@@Dr.W.Krueger 15.5 MHz, which was most mid-range PCs in 1991. If anything, the reason why it was DoA was because Philips never intended it to be a games console, but rather a multimedia player.
@@Dr.W.Krueger pssst liking your comment doesn't make you right. also most of the applications were slow likely due to the CD format, as CD format was still pretty new when it came to video games.
@@GiordanDiodato From my understanding the CD-i didn't have any dedicated 2D graphics acceleration hardware, as a result games would run much worse than on something like the Mega Drive despite not really looking much better (you can even see how poorly Tetris runs in this very video). It really wasn't a very well designed gaming machine.
CDi was used as a digital manual for a few US weapon systems in the 90’s. I provided 3D animation for intros for the group who put those digital manuals together.
I remember using it in lessons at my driving school back in the 90s, it was perfect for practicing traffic situations, all with videos etc. There were a lot of e-learning and practice systems using cd-i in that time
Nintendo actually had nothing to do with them. They simply licensed the characters (not the series, but the characters) to Phillips as part of their agreement to develop a CD addon for the SNES. That's why the games don't use The Legend of Zelda, or Super Mario Bros names. They didn't have the rights to that. They only had the rights to Link, Zelda, Mario, Luigi, and Peach IIRC. Just the characters themselves. And Nintendo had zero involvement in the games.
"VHS was incapable of S-video by its very nature". This isn't true. It's just that most players didn't have the port. The signal is recorded on the tape as separate luma and chroma signals (as separate FM signals being recorded through the same head), though, and a Super-VHS deck can certainly output those from a normal VHS tape. (As can some higher-end VHS decks that may be out there)
Coderjo yeah, that was a “wait, what” moment for me as well. The s-video standard was originally made for VHS. Almost every VCR I’ve owned since S-VHS has that port and it helps greatly with standard VHS tapes depending on the TV.
@Coderjo while chroma and luma are stored separately on VHS, their bandwith is so low that there's no gain to be made. Besides, what's used as source here is a composite video one, so even though it's stored separately on the tape, it's still for all intense and purposes, composite video. because the deck sees composite video and it then separates it for storage. It's not as if you're inputing S-video on the tape... even if you use an S-video input. The best VHS players players do not even have S-Video output. If we look at the reference, which is probably Sony's SVO line of broadcast-grade decks, the SuperVHS models do not produce as good a picture as the standard deck equipped with composite only. for regular VHS tapes.
s -VHS output had the purpose of getting higher resolution in the TV from super VHS tapes . At that time, many televisions had bad filters, which may have resulted in a resolution of 330 lines. although the most exclusive televisions they had something called digital comb filter that could provide up to 380 line resolution in practice. And the difference you saw in the test image. now it could even say the smallest pattern in the test image. even super VHS recorders had comb filters in their tuners
@@someoneontheinternet3090 I have one CD + graphics it’s The Jimi Hendrix Experience “Smash Hits”. I remember it came in a long box with a hype sticker “CD +” with extra graphics! I did get to watch the graphics once on my drummers big entertainment set up around 1990. I think it’s fun.
I remember seeing a CD-i in my high school's art class. My teacher used it to show art stuff. Heh, a few people played video games on it. I remember its TV ads.
I remember my Weird Al - Running with scissors CD had a like short movie on it and I watched it over and over again. ALSO: Back in 1999 I had a Power Mac 6100 w/DOS card and in order to play mpeg videos I used the Weird Al CD. The CD had a Quicktime MPEG extension (in order to play movies) and I copied it to the extensions folder in MacOS. I remember using random CD-ROM's for the extensions that they came with. You have to remember that in the 80's and 90's a lot of Mac formatted CD-ROM's were also start up discs because even back then hard drives and plenty of storage space were not in everyone's computer. Those System Folders on those discs were awesome cause you could copy them and boot up your mac with a burned CD or external SCSI Iomega Zip and Jazz drives. [crying like a baby] "I miss my old Macintosh collection"
I have that Weird Al CD with the SECRET FILE! folder/directory. I was excited when I found it myself (kind of like when I found the undocumented MS-DOS command TRUENAME).
Those random System Folders found on CDs i used to be able to get from the library were a godsend for troubleshooting when I tinkered a little too much as a kid. Collecting different versions of extensions included with software and trying all of them out was a fun past time
The Korn life is peachy album has the adidas video on it, pretty awesome discovery, made me go thru all my cds back in the day and tried them on my computer trying to find something else
Mike L what I hate is how many of those have programs that just play songs or videos off websites that ceased to exist years ago and are now completely useless
@@syloui DUDE! me too, I would bring home another old macintosh system and use some random CD or CD-ROM as a boot disc. I remember when I came across the Quicktime-MPEG extension. I was so stoked cause I was now able to watch videos on my mac. I think I had the PowerMac 6100/66 with the DOS card and Windows 95 on it at some point. Apple's OS were so easy to install and troubleshoot, lol that all changed with OS X.
The soundtrack on the 2D Zelda CDi games is actually really good and is a thing many people overlook. Check it out it’s really cool and the best part of the game.
Adrian Zanoli hmm... how much power can you harvest from memes? I mean a funny meme will make you laugh, and laughing takes energy, so could you show people memes to make them laugh, then harvest the energy they spend while laughing and use that to power a computer? It’s probably the least efficent way you could ever harvest energy, but it’s possible.
I remember an art lesson where the teacher wheeled out a TV on a trolley with a CD-i player and showed us a number of paintings on a Photo CD to explain a few things. Would work better today with a big screen and HD but it was just about sufficient at the time! Very slow navigation though, I remember that. I guess that would've been around 1994 or 1995.
Laserdisc was often used in this role as well. When I got a couple of LD players that were lying around my high school, it came with CAV disks, each frame of which was a photo for the science teacher to display on the TV.
@@CODMarioWarfare the only time I've ever seen a laserdisc was the player for the Domesday project for which it was the data storage format - it being a bit before the CD-ROM. A cunning mixture of data and video content, those things. And so big and shiny! I was much impressed.
9:16 I remember most DVD players _not_ being capable of playing VCD's. I remember in 2002 we finally got a new Sony model to replace our horrible KLH player and it had VCD compatibility. I was in love with it because I had a lot of low quality Simpsons episodes and I would use Nero to burn them to VCD's and watch them whenever. We were 4 years away from getting a DVD burner. Nero was great because it allowed you to make your own menus for VCD's albeit they were limited, no cursor support, you could place 9 choices on a menu (VCD's could only fit so much anyways) and each was assigned a number but with clever graphic tricks you could make some really nice looking menus.
I remember that they showed video on one of these in a store and and I was very impressed with the pure colors in the picture. much cleaner colors than on VHS and even live analogue TV. in Europe, Philips used scart RGB. thus a cable connection that separated red green and blue. And of course the TV would have a black screen and the screen would be flat
A SCART cable also has pins for composite and S-video signals. Some cables don't even have all of the 21 pins connected - if the source was VHS, for example, it doesn't matter because the cable/connector can't make the original source signal any better. With DVD you could get true RGB signal, so the high-quality SCART cable is needed (if one doesn't go with component video, VGA or HDMI of course).
OMG you answered a life long question I always had. I remember playing Tetris at a block buster demo station when I was a kid and I thought it was so cool with its realistic background and nice music. and I never knew what console that was and years later assumed it was PS1, well a couple years later when I got a PS1 I bought several tetris' trying to find that one but never did and eventually gave up. But now I know!
I remember music with graphics was attempted again in the mid 2000s with DVD audio. It was supposed to have surround sound, lyrics, and often music videos. I remember when Weird Al's album "Straight Outta Lynnwood" came in the short lived "Dual Disc" format, where one side was the CD and the other DVD-A. Pretty sure I only used the DVD side once. I hated that format and was glad it died. It didn't work in some CD players, and it felt heavier than an average disc so I'm sure it caused extra strain on the players that it did work in. Ended up burning a 1:1 copy of the CD side so I could play it in more devices. Dave if you ever want to do a video on the DualDisc format I'll gladly provide you some material lol.
I remember working on the early versions of Cluedo (Clue in the US). It was a horrid system to work on.. It was unmodified OS/9 and the tools were very immature, we basically had to rewrite everything from the CD mastering software to the SDK because the supplied stuff from philips was.. bad.. In those days to burn a CD (a blank cost £50) you had to master it to raw* format and send it directly to the burner (from a Sun Workstation supplied by Philips, no internet back then though).. which was bolted to an external wall to stop vibration, and if a lorry went past it'd destroy the burn.. we wasted a *lot* of money on bad burns. When I left we were still working on trying to get the board (a graphic about 4 times bigger than the memory!) to stream piecemeal off the drive without it stuttering. No idea if they ever fixed that.. I've never actually seen a finished version. * Really raw - you had to prescramble it.. data on a CD isn't written the way it's read, the bits are moved around to help reliability, there are prescribed inter block and gaps, etc. When a modern CD talks about 'raw' reading they're not really at all, since that layer is built in to the hardware now.
I'm surprised it was so heavily marketed in the US... never saw an advert for it in the UK, it mostly sat around in the back of Tandy next to the CD+G machine. By the time I stopped working on it CD-ROM was starting to become a thing, and although it still required expensive video decoders (and eyebleedingly expensive encoding - remember PCs couldn't even decode at the time let alone encode, so you had to send video off to agencies to have it encoded) it was kind of obvious where the market was going.
hi i just want to say for all the difficulties in producing the cluedo games they were really good for their times and whoever cast the live action scenes got really good actors like joan simms and angus mcinnes . i seem to recall was in a game for british petroleum making the grade??? i used to have that years ago although it never worked well on my cdi.
This was an amazing and exciting back in the days, I've had a chance to use a full Philips set when I lived in The Netherlands around 1997, CD-i, TV, receiver and all bells and whistles. Brings great memories.. Thank you for mentioning it!!!
For more details on all these different CD standards, the Technology Connections channel has an excellent video on all the different rainbow book standards.
On some VCRs you have to push in the tape almost all the way by hand, while on others all you need to do is give it a slight nudge and then it will automatically pull the tape is. Looks like he was used to the former type but was using the latter type of VCR.
"It was never really intended to be a video game console...It was supposed to be a media center for your living room. Sort of like XBox One of the day." (c)
OH my, so many memories. The CD-i was my de-facto "computer" / games console when I was in my late teens. That was the time before Desktop PCs were a little more affordable. Even then the unit was rather expensive when it was purchased for me as a present. When I think about how much it was sold for at a flea market a few years ago just to clear out space at my parents' house, it makes me cry a little bit inside. And no, it wouldn't have been realistic for me to hang on to it, despite the memories. And as pointed out, it wasn't just a gaming platform. I had some other more educational CD-is which were great like a guitar learning disc I forgot the name of, I had an encyclopedia I think and a video CD of Queen's music videos from Greatest Hits 1 and 2. My favourite game was Flashback, which is a sequel to Another World. One of the few games I actually finished. There was some kind of dinosaur one I can't recall the name of (Lost Eden, had to google it) which was quite good, and yes some others were not as good but it was a fun diverse platform. Can't disagree on the controller though, it was rather poor. Though mine was slimmer than the one you demonstrated, probably because it was a continental Europe model, which also used the SCART socket system at the back instead of those antenna ports (I think). Thanks for this episode Dave, that was a good trip down memory lane :)
Did the Queen disc allow you to interact with the music, or was it just music videos on a VCD? I ask because Peter Gabriel and Todd Rundgren each put out actual CD-i specific releases where you were able to interact with and manipulate the music and video.
@@danieldaniels7571 As far as I recall they were just a catalogue of their music videos, no interaction there. I do remember something from Peter Gabriel now that you mention it though
SVCD comes to mind. From what I remember it was somewhat popular over in Asia, had a resolution of 480x480, the video was encoded using MPEG-2, and it was produced on CD media.
Did you make sure it works. Apparently CDi's are notorious for not lasting this long. Apparently some of the components (maybe the capacitors or the on board battery) are prone to degrade.
@@fattiger6957 Apparently the tray and spindle need repair, but that's a simple fix. I think its always more fun to have a project though as opposed to something that works straight out of the box. I'm dreading the timer chip repair though.
Great video guys. I agree 100% regarding the Tetris port. On kind of a fun note I wanted to mention that I have the Phillips CD-i Tetris soundtrack on vinyl. It is one of my favorite records in my collection. Just nothing but pure 90's nostalgia, great calming music.
BurnCycle was amazing. And the Art titles were very, very, good: Harvest of the Sun, for example. It had its time. We were lucky to have the experience in the 90s, and being here to remmember, in the 2020's.
I'd just like to point out that, like Dragon's Lair, Mad Dog Mccree was in the arcade first. Thanks for this comprehensive and admirably objective look at the CD-i, I learned a lot.
Loved the video, Dave! But I am afraid you still have a misconception about VHS. It stores luma and chroma separate. You can indeed output it as s-video, it's not "impossible." Apart from S-VHS devices there were other VHS devices with s-video output such as Hi8/VHS tandem machines. The Sony SLV-T2000MN is a good example. What you mean to say is that the compression on chroma is very high, and that quality at the source is similar for composite video and what is obtainable from VHS. Outputting it through real world cables and mixing signals (!) in one case is a totally different story. The whole concept of component video signals, to which s-video also belongs, relies in keeping signals separate.
Saying that luma and chroma are separate is stupid and wrong. They are part of one single signal on VHS and on SVHS both, just like composite. However on composite, chroma is encoded on top of luma, corresponding to the broadcast format, but downconverted for channel independence. On VHS and SVHS, this encoding would not be stable or suitable, so it's the other way around, called colour-under, the luma signal is upshifted on top of chroma instead. So indeed S-Video connection for both VHS and S-VHS makes technical sense, since it allows to avoid merging and separating these signals an extra couple times.
Yeah, he lost me there too. All high end VHS VCRs has S-Video output on them, and anyone who had decent home theater systems back then knew it made a noticeable difference to use it.
@Boojakascha while chroma and luma are stored separately on VHS, their bandwith is so low that there's no gain to be made. Besides, what's used as source here is a composite video one, so even though it's stored separately on the tape, it's still for all intense and purposes, composite video. because the deck sees composite video and it then separates it for storage. It's not as if you're inputing S-video on the tape... even if you use an S-video input. The best VHS players players do not even have S-Video output. If we look at the reference, which is probably Sony's SVO line of broadcast-grade decks, the SuperVHS models do not produce as good a picture as the standard deck equipped with composite only. for regular VHS tapes.
@@Boojakascha its still pretty low bandwith, compared to a full luma signal like that of SVideo. I think it's like halved OTTOMH. My point still stands : SVideo outputs on VCRs do not make good use of the color under separate storage of VHS. They don't look better than composite out from a reference broadcast VCR.
*_Nice of the princess to invite us over for a picnic at Micro Center, eh Luigi?_* *_I hope she made lots of computers!_* *_Luigi, look! It's from GameStop!_* *_"Dear Pesky Plumbers, the Koopalings and I have taken over the Mushroom Kingdom. The princess is now a permanent guest at one of my seven Koopa GameStops. I dare you to find her if you can!"_* *_We gotta find the Princess!_* *_And you gotta help us!_*
theone Andonly you might rethink that sheep statement. As of today there are now more confirmed Coronavirus cases in the US than China or Italy, and NYC has so many deaths from it that they’re having to put tents outside their hospitals to use as temporary morgues. But yeah, you have the constitutional right to ignore the warnings. You do you...
the AVGN episode was focused on the Bad .. Well that's his thing, that's the show . I always knew there was some Playable games On the CDi. its not as bad as it seems. but Never for 700$ that's why almost no one had one at home
Yep, I remember reading about the CDi in game magazines at the time, between the absurdly high price point, the lack of focus or vision for what the device was supposed to be (no one really knew what to make of a "multimedia center" back then") and a severe lack of third party support (again, no one knew what to make of it which mean developers didn't know what to make *for* it), it died a swift and quiet death. It didn't help that the systems were massively underpowered compared to contemporary hardware like PCs and some next-gen gaming consoles, especially for the price point the CDi was being sold at, and that lack of power meant that the consoles around the corner - Sega Saturn, Nintendo 64, Playstation - were already destined to outperform (both in terms of sales and hardware performance) the CDi at nearly half the price. Ultimately, the console was a victim of being overly ambitious with a relatively new technology that just wasn't advanced enough to be cost effective or desirable for the average consumer.
@@Andersljungberg That's a large part of why it failed too; it was completely unfocused on what kind of machine it wanted to be and the average consumer wasn't going to spend that much money on what they saw as a glorified game console. By that point, most households already had DVD players for educational films and desktop PCs and Macs of the same price could do everything the CD-i could do and more, especially in terms of educational programs; most people saw it as an underpowered game console with some extra bells and whistles.
Hey! You showed a clip of the "Atlantis: The Last Resort" game, which I wrote when I worked at Philips Research Labs in Redhill, UK. Glad you showed that as it was very fun and very challenging to write!!!
I used to make VCDs back in the day and play them on my DVD player. Fun fact: since DVDs are encoded with MPEG-2, some DVD players even supported non-standard VCDs encoded in MPEG-2, meaning better picture quality than a standard MPEG-1 VCD.
Indeed. I used to make VCDs as well so I could play movies on my DVD player. And yes, I made the "XVCD" as well, which used twice the resolution and MPEG2 since my player supported it.
I remember when DVD players started to support MPEG4 DivX encoded CDs, it was a DVD quality movie on a CD. However in recent years I see full HD movie of Bluray quality fit on a single CD by using mkv matroshka codec, I don't know how is this even possible.
Actually the photo format on a cd-i was really brilliant : it contained one foto in different sizes in one file. The smallest first. And the cool thing was that the next up in size was actually only adding pixels to the smaller one. And so on. So you get more and more detail the longer you wait. And can see the full image quickly in raw format. Really concept that I didn't see back in most new image formats.
"CD-I wasn't bad, it was just AVGN video making everyone think it was bad!" Uh, no, it really was awful as a videogame console. A few half-decent games and ports don't make up for the dozens upon dozens of horrid games.
@@FadingBulb57227 AVGN is just a comedie, not a serious reviews. James Rolfte is not really angry as a normal person who get married and live like a normal been. The AVGN is just his false character play by James -- a invented character who represent some players who have angry issues.
Yeah, the Nerd is right. CD-I games are mostly shit. There might be some half decent games hidden in there but that's a lot of garbage to dig through to find them. The Game Grumps did full play through of both Zelda games and boy are they bad. Between poor controls, terrible animations, and bad game design, the CD-I is not a gaming platform.
@@ChadKimberly01 The real issue was that it wasn't really great at what it was trying to do either, it didn't really replace VCRs because it couldn't record, and there was already another better established video format for home theater enthusiasts that had better quality. It didn't really replace computers either because it couldn't do any productivity tasks like word processing or spreadsheets, and nobody outside of a few educational institutions was buying computers solely to run multimedia software.
Rather odd to advertise the thing as a VCR replacement when it can't play movies out of the box and can't record TV shows under any circumstances at all. Betamax would be preferable, even in 1990.
Yes. The CD-I was a failure on so many fronts. The video is all too kind and nostalgic. It was never even decent. Philips had a lot of wishful thinking...
“Sears which doesn’t sell any electronics anymore, but that’s a topic for another episode.” Little did I know that it would be an actual episode about America’s electronics stores.
I think CD-I was a novel concept but a bit too early for the market. I’ve never considered it to be a game console, but more as an edutainment system. I tend to see it as a prototype for DVD, the movies on CD where a good idea, as DVD proved to be very successful. Just like the commodore CDTV, the storage capacity of CD-roms offered a lot of potential but developers did not really know how to use it effectively as they where sort of testing the waters. The Sega Mega CD’s best feature in my opinion is the red book CD audio which when used well can really enhance the game like for instance Ecco the dolphin. But the playstation proved that optical media where inevitably the future, a boat that Nintendo missed out on in that transitional era.When I first saw CD-I players, they where demonstrated in book stores with the Roller ball controller attached to it featuring some educational titles. As a kid I was quite fascinated by it. To me it did not appear as game console but more as a system for other types of games (primarily edutainment). It wasn't until around 1995 that I noticed Philips promoting it more as a games system. Sadly it's interactive multimedia features where not really carried over to DVD, maybe this was intentional? Oddly enough Blue ray disc has a Java based scripting Language that could replicated most (if not all) of CD-I's features but are not really utilised by publishers.
Based on another comment from a former CD-I developer, it seems that developers weren't uncertain how to utilize it, but rather prevented from pushing the limits of the device by way of the requirement for indefinite hardware backwards compatibility as part of the format standards. This device could have easily been the PlayStation had Phillips allowed for more growth in the format.
This was also the time where technology was really becoming more advanced year after year. As you said the problem was that a CD-i from 1995 is the same system as one from 1991. If you look at computers at the time, that 4 year gap is HUGE. 386 to Pentiums, RAM increasing at least four-fold, Hard Drives starting to go into the Gigabyte range, etc.
The thing about Video CDs, just like laserdiscs didn’t took off in America but was hugely successful in Asia, in-fact you can still buy contemporary movies on the format to this day.
My old megacd played them as well. Apart from lyrics it wasnt very impressive. Was fun going through cds to see what random stuff was encoded on them, quite a few didnt advertise the cd+g bit at all.
Those karaoke players will also play the CD+G graphics from music discs. I have the Information Society, Jimi Hendrix, Fleetwood Mac and a sampler from Sega.
Miss the VCD era. I had a portable CD player, just like a walkman, that could play VCD's. It was unbelievable, back when the smallest thing to play a VCD was the size of a VCR. The brand was NAPA. Some Japanese company.
Good video. It is a misunderstood piece of hardware generally. I believe it was also used massively in the UK (and presumably elsewhere in the world) within retail to run interactive information booths. For example in Boots there was a "Choose Your Shade of Lipstick" type kiosk that I believe ran on CDi hardware
What rock have you been living under? There was an entire hour long info-mercial on this , back in the 90s that I remember seeing. The guy was being shown it and a girl 'help' was there to offer help.. if he said the word 'help' and.. er.. whatever.
The fact that Tetris and Lemmings are both playable and enjoyable on the CD-i, show that even the more maligned consoles *can* have a few gems in their library. But still, either do one thing really well and totally dominate (NES and PlayStation 1 vs Sega Genesis/32x/CD), or do everything mostly okay and skimp on nothing (VHS vs Betamax and CED). Phillips CD-i focused on too much, too early, and did none of it very well. And nobody enjoys trying to eat a half-cooked turkey, no matter what it's stuffed with.
Hello there everybody. I would like to share some words here. Sincerelly, when i saw this system for the first time i really got astonished by it's quality. Image was simply outstanding for that time standards. Yes, VHS, could do a bit better resolution, has more lines indeed, specially on PAL systems, but, at the end of the day, the crispness of the audio, and the chroma was way better in the CD-i. I remember to watch some Bryan Adams video again and again looking thru the glass of some store near my place, that had speakers outside. For me was simply impressive, i had a C128 back then, and i only had some experience with the ST and the Amiga thanks to a great friend of mine. However, both machines were not FMV capable. So it was like magic. As Dave said, Philips never intended to make a games machine from the CD-i, but an interactive player for multimedia and multipurpose tasks. In some aspects, CD-i was NOT fully understood by the main public. Many magazines treated it like a games console, which it wasn't. System price was not exactly "popular", it was quite high. CD Video was never an standard on western countries, so Philips failed there, it would have had a chance in asian countries since CD video had quite a lot of popularity for some years. Philips lost a great opportunity ruining the license for the Zelda and Mario games it got from their venture with Sony for the SNES-CD, after the failure, they got permission from Nintendo to make some games. Zelda games for the CD-i are, how to say it, a complete atrocity... Hotel Mario was a so-so game with some charisma that was quite playable if you had a gamepad, but, sincerelly, animations ruin the product overall. That's because at the time, Philips didn't care a shit about videogames, remember that the CD-i had a very long production run, and ONLY at later stages, Philips thought it could jump into the videogame market and grab a share there. Too late... They handed Mario and Zelda to poorly skilled teams, that really made these promising titles a pile of garbage. There was another Mario game in development, it looked quite good, it resembled me to Super Mario World, but it stopped at a very early stage for some reason. What could we say about the hardware? By the time it hit the shelves, was quite promising, a 15mhz 16/32bit 68k compatible CPU, 1MB of RAM, Hi-Res capable, Hi-Color, 8 16bit PCM channels... What went wrong here? First, the N68070 had a serious drawback, i can't remember the details, but as far as i can remember, it needed to use double cycle in order to execute 68k instructions, so, if you don't code for native 070 instructions, the extra speed is lost. Most of the ports for the CD-i are poorly done, as a result, games, can be "slightly worse" than their Amiga counterparts. Remember that the CD-i didn't use sprites, so it was more like an Atari ST with steroids and digital audio. Flashback, Lemmings, Defender of the Crown, Lords of the Rising Sun, Litil Divil, and Striker are example of this, they are somehow a bit worse than on the Amiga... They're quite playable though, i believe it's because they didn't optimize the code in order to port them to the Philips. On the other hand, there are a couple of titles, like Lucky Luke and The Apprentice (specially this second one) that really show what the CD-i was capable of. It's a pity that the system was not understood by the main public, games were in the most of the cases done by unskilled teams, and there's no scene at all for this console... It had very interesting features, there were even a limited "internet connection" and a keyboard available. There was a lot of information about the system available, the documentation for this system is quite extense and Philips did a great work with it. However, it seems no one is interested on the system that could be capable of some nice 16bit ports. Not even a single MOD player was developed for it despite having better sound capabilities than the Amiga... Simply, scene doesn't exist, despite being a capable sytem.
The CD-i also doesn't seem to have much in terms of emulation. You CAN do it in MAME now, but it seems to require quite a bit of setup to get working. And there doesn't appear to be an actively developed alternative emulator, either. :/
CD plus Graphics was something I remember most about my SEGA CD! It came with a demo of CD+G including the Information Society song you played. My favorite part was Spock saying "pure energy". (Well at least I think it was Spock) Ahhh them some good times.
The CD-i made it onto Guru Larry's list of consoles that are literally rotting away because the lithium batteries that it uses for saving are hard to replace.
Especially the period with their partnership with Sony begrudgingly collapsed and resulted in the PlayStation which ended Nintendo’s dominance on the video game industry.
@@Claro1993 I would argue that Nintendo's dominance never actually ended, since their competition never turned a profit, all they really lost was attention.
@@handsomebrick Never made a profit??? Even if Sony sold every console they ever made at a loss (which they didn't since only the first few years of a console's life are sold at a loss) They have pulled in billions and billions in licensing fees. In case you didn't know, the purpose of business is to make money and no company would keep funding a division that loses money. There's a reason Sony has kept making consoles for 26 years. Hell, the Playstation division has been one of the few saving graces at Sony since people aren't buying their consumer electronics as much as they used to.
@@fattiger6957 They have very cut licensing fees to entice third parties, plus their attach rate is pretty bad which cuts licensing fees further, and they have many expenses which they hide such as paying for a lot of development tools and marketing, I suspect that the 2011-2012 crash was due to Sony starting to go broke and being unable to foot these costs anymore and selling a huge amount of their assets, they got into the console business because they assumed they could have an easy monopoly since the other big companies (Nintendo, Sega, Atari) were extremely small in comparison to them and they planned to leverage this monopoly for a general takeover of all media (big corporations are less concerned with profit than the ability to destroy their competition), that plan is now extremely dead but they can't pull out of video games now since the rest of their company is in ruins and they've sunk so much investment into it.
@@handsomebrick You don't think that maybe Sony was doing bad because sales of their TVs, cellphones, bluray players, etc were all down tremendous and their film studio constantly put out flops (with the exception of a few movies like Spider-Man) rather than the one division they report as being profitable. And don't tell me Sony is cooking their books to make PlayStation look better. They are a publicly traded company and they don't have the clout to cover up something so big.
Gee, it sure is boring around here. King: My boy, this peace is what all true warriors strive for! Link: I just wonder what Ganon's up to. Gwoman flies into the castle on his magic carpet* Gwoman: Your majesty, Ganon and his minions have seized the island of Koridai! King: Hmmm... How can we help? Gwoman: It is written: Only Link can defeat Ganon. Link: Great! I'll grab my stuff. Gwoman: There is no time, your sword is enough! Link (to Zelda): How about a kiss, for luck? Zelda: You've got to be kidding! *Gwoman and Link take to the skies on the magic carpet* Gwoman: Squadala, we're off! Link: Wow, what are all those heads? Gwoman: These are the faces of Evil. You must conquer each. Link: I guess I'd better get going. Gwoman: Here is the map. Where to you wish to go?
The CD-I gets a bad wrap. People confuse it thinking it was a gaming console. It wasn’t. It was an all-in-one multimedia center that was designed to replace all your electronics on your tv (and that included gaming consoles). And when it first got released in 1993 it was actually quite groundbreaking. It just didn’t catch on because it was marketed wrong.
The CDG portion reminded me of the Sony copy protection malware boondoggle. Anyone remember that? Putting an audio CD in your computer drive could auto-launch software that messed up your cd rom drivers. Done intentionally. By Sony. As “copy protection”. And yes, it happened to me and the only way I knew to fix it at the time was to reinstall the OS.
I did love mad dog mcree in the arcades,,, brilliant video,, you are reminding me of lost memory files, you are doing more than you may have first thought possible, it's amazing that an old computer or game can reignite a memory path❤️👍
Oh man, I remember the photo CD. My dad was a serious aquarium hobbyist who ended up writing some books on tropical fish, and for those projects he ended up getting several of his rolls of film developed into Photo CD format to make the layout process easier for whoever he hired to do it. I remember being really impressed by the quality of the maximum resolution, the negatives were scanned in at something seemingly astronomical like 3000x2000 (this was back in the 1024x768 desktop resolution days). They were the first recordable CDs I'd ever seen, a fact which astonished me at the time, since we were still a few years from consumer-accessible CD-writers.
Reason the CD-i got Nintendo-games is that after long having worked with Sony with what would've been the Nintendo Playstation, Nintendo decided they had gotten a bad deal and decided to cooperate with Philips instead. This betrayal caused Sony to decide to develop their own console and the rest is history.
I worked on CD-i productions at Codim between 1994 and 1995. Codim (for some time known as SPC/Codim) was a small but important producer of CD-i titles, many under the Philips name.
You probably wouldn't have heard about anything I wrote; I mostly worked on educational titles. But if you look at the small print of many Philips CD-i titles, you'll probably see the Codim name.
CD-i started out as a good idea but had one major flaw: All CD-i discs had to be playable on all CD-i players. Not only did this mean that European (PAL) discs had to be playable in the USA (NTSC) but it also meant that there would never be an upgraded version of CD-i with more memory, a faster CD drive, a hard disk or a network interface (though some of those were available on the professional players). After all, why would anyone invest in a fast CD drive, more memory etc. if all discs would play in the basic system with a 1x speed drive. And why would anyone write a game that could play better in a CD-i player with more features if it was mandatory that it should also play in players that wouldn't have those features.
My favorite CD-i application was: Background music. Philips had a department back then called Background Music Services (BMS). They were a competitor of Muzak (guess who won and competed the other away). Once a month, they would send a box of DAT tapes to Codim, which we recorded to the hard disk of a computer with a special Sony DSP sound card that cost thousands of dollars but could encode audio to ADPCM format in real-time. The computer had a program (programmed in MS-DOS by my predecessor) that would split the two channels (each channel had one track of music) and multiplexed the ADPCM audio into a real-time mode-2 form 2 file. The file would be part of a disc image, as well as another file with text info (such as song titles). The result was something that could be played with a CD-i player or with a special BGM player (google for the Philips BMS 3000). It could fit 4 to 8 hours of music if I recall correctly. The process of converting one pair of two DAT tapes into one disc image that would go to the factory in Germany, would take a day, and there were usually 10 disc images to be made each month. I wanted to make my own BGM CD but never got around to it. Now the only information about the format that's available on the Internet seems to come from... me.
Anyway, I have good memories of working for Codim. It was a great team and we had a lot of fun together. I left because I was getting tired of doing the same thing over and over all the time.
One more thing: Please stop twisting CD's inside jewel cases: if there's a bit of dirt between the case and the CD, it will make a nice perfectly round scratch that will make it unplayable.
Held! In andere tijden had ik je hand geschud!
Mijn CD-i heeft een belangrijke plek in mijn hobby-kamer!
@@jelle_smid Als je ooit een Vapro (Vakopleiding Procestechniek) CD-i in handen krijgt, dan heb ik die waarschijnlijk gemaakt.
Great story, I'm making a homebrew FMW game for the CD-i, the base model, with only 1 MB of RAM looks like the major problem to me, the extended case with additional 1.5 MB from the DVC help a lot, but most of the early games and softwares had to fit in the 1MB ram.
Looks like make sounds effect and music work at the same time isn't easy at all.
@Lassi Kinnunen Maybe I should have said: the main major TECHNICAL flaw :-)
I lived in the home town of Philips but I don't know anyone who owned a CD-i. I never owned one myself either. Everyone I knew already had a PC or some other computer like an Amiga. And they were just way more useful.
VideoCDs took off about as much as Laser Discs, which is about as much as a lead balloon. Who wants to buy a movie that doesn't even fit on a single disc? Yes it was digital so it was robust, but the quality wasn't any better than VHS and everyone already had a VHS. VCD was a solution without a problem.
I almost like the CD-i, it just had way too many issues to be actually, well, good. My only hunt now is to try and find a development kit for the system, so I could try to make some homebrew on it without trying to reverse engineer a console I don't physically own.
I remember dad renting the CD-I and 3DO (yes renting game consoles used to be a thing) and they both were way more impressive then the genesis and snes, then he rented a playstation. you dont have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what was the new appliance in our living room a week later.
I always have liked the 3DO more than the PS, myself. I realize that's an unpopular position. I have never owned a PS, nor wanted to, since they came out in the US.
@@RetroDawn 🤯
Renting game consoles is still a thing. I rented one from Aaron’s.
We used to rent IBM PC and compatibles and VIC-20 before that.
Renting electronics used to be big in the UK, my parents rented a TV at one point.
The first summer job I had as a teenager was at Burger King, and they used CD-i for their training videos. There's hundreds of undocumented discs out there for businesses.
I bet they got lotsa Spaghetti!
that's interesting.
Then again it started as a "multimedia console" (almost a decade before the PS2, btw) so that makes sense.
Me too! What year was this? For me, this was in 1999.
@@Tornado1994 Great to hear someone else remembers this. Considering you kinda had to be a HUGE NERD to even realize it was a CD-i system...
For me, I believe it was 1998, but also again in 1999.
@@anactualmotherbear They were still using it in 2000.
Thanks for the shout out. I just uploaded them all, and removed the audio from the ones that got take down notices. Surprisingly many of them are allowed. I have a fairly complete collection of the Warner Era CD+G titles, notably missing Phoebe Snow - Something Real, so always looking out for the CD+G version of that which is apparently pretty rare! Thanks again!
No problem. I'm surprised you saw this video!
@@The8BitGuy Got a flurry of new followers and someone mentioned seeing it on 8 bit guy. So a quick google, and....
@@thecdgmuseum9287 I'm waiting for completing to your replying
"Here's the problem! Too many toasters! You know what they say? All toasters toast toast!"
Yeah!
DEAR PESKY PLUMBERS
@@coolguy02536 the koopalings and i have taken over the mushroom kingdom
The princess is now a permanent guest at one of my seven Koopa hotels.
@@cwballard1751 i dare you to find her if you can
My mind was blown when my mom finally let me rent the CDI (Magnavox model) from Blockbuster. I only had it for 3 days, with one game rented, but I stayed glued to that sucker the entire weekend. Cheers!
What game did you play?
"Sears, which doesn't sell electronics anymore"
They ain't selling much of anything anymore Dave lol.
They were acquired by K-Mart. Both brands still exist, but there aren't many retail stores left. Which makes me sad - they were the best for consumer appliances.
@@Shamino0 Our K-mart smelt like sewer and didn't have anything in stock. Got replaced by Target and Ross very very recently.
@@INeedAttentionEXE So, a different scent of sewer..?
Sears Canada is 100% defunct....
@@RetroMMA I get the joke, haha, they did however fix the sewer leak.
These potential copyright strikes on a channel like this is for audio and video is utterly ridiculous. I feel for you 8 bit Guy.
Especially as absolutely everything he's doing falls squarely under Fair Use.
I mean any video can be copyright striked, but I think he *meant* he would get content matched and lose monetization. Afaik, when content is matched, it doesn't give a copyright strike. It either causes the video to be unplayable, unplayable in certain regions, or will lose monetization. Copyright strikes only really happen when someone manually files a copyright claim on a video, which does indeed happen, unfortunately. Copyright strikes are obviously the one that can heavily impact your channel in a ton of ways.
@@seanhamilton4169 It is under fair use
Like the movie industry doesn't make enough money. Greed pastards.
But that means Nintendo acknowledges these games. And probably it won't do that because they're an infamous chapter on their history
Me : Sees the CD-I.
My Brain : Lamp Oil, Rope, Bombs? It's yours my friend as long you have enough rupees.
Sorry Link, I can't give credit.
Come back when you're a little,
*MMMMMMMMMM*
_Richer!_
Nice of the princess to invite us over for a picnic, gay Luigi?
This is illegal, you know.
I just wonder what Ganon's up to!
Gee, it sure is boring 'round here
"Hotel Mario... The cutscenes aren't all that great". I think the cutscenes are actually the best part of the game.
*I HOPE YOU MADE LOTS OF SPAGHETTI!*
LUIGI LOOK!
did U finished the game?
Well, in a certain way, they're oddly attractive, well, they're atrocious... But you probably enjoy to see how bad they are... I happened to me back then... Watch the intro scenes, and say, "what a pile of garbage"... However, not being able to skip them, not wanting to skip them either...
Some kind of sadomasochist taste... Heh...
It's like a train wreck in the best way.
FUNFACT: The hole in the middle of the cd/cdi is the same size of the dutch(FL) coin of 10 cents .... a choice by Philips when deciding how big the hole in the middle shoud be.
What about the Laserdisc hole? Phillips made Laserdisc too.
And guess what led up to the CD originally being a max of 74 minutes long? Beethoven’s 9th symphony.
@@williamreid6255 i think someone debunked that
Nowadays even the €0,01 coin is slightly too big to git on the hole😂 (yes I just tested that)
despite the memes it created, the CD-i was a pretty advanced home console for its time
It had 1MB of RAM at a time where most consoles barely had 128KB of RAM.
yes, all that memory is great to have. what is not great is the slow CPU and dinky VDP.
dead on arrival.
@@Dr.W.Krueger 15.5 MHz, which was most mid-range PCs in 1991. If anything, the reason why it was DoA was because Philips never intended it to be a games console, but rather a multimedia player.
@@GiordanDiodato
It was too slow. Period. Just look at the applications on this abomination.
@@Dr.W.Krueger pssst liking your comment doesn't make you right.
also most of the applications were slow likely due to the CD format, as CD format was still pretty new when it came to video games.
@@GiordanDiodato From my understanding the CD-i didn't have any dedicated 2D graphics acceleration hardware, as a result games would run much worse than on something like the Mega Drive despite not really looking much better (you can even see how poorly Tetris runs in this very video). It really wasn't a very well designed gaming machine.
At least we got those spicy Hotel Mario memes
And Zelda!
Nice of the 8-Bit Guy to upload a video, eh Luigi?
MAH BOI
true tho
I bet they got lots of spaghetti!
CDi was used as a digital manual for a few US weapon systems in the 90’s. I provided 3D animation for intros for the group who put those digital manuals together.
A portable unit with built in monitor was used I the field. It was to fulfill the requirement for paper and digital instruction.
I remember using it in lessons at my driving school back in the 90s, it was perfect for practicing traffic situations, all with videos etc. There were a lot of e-learning and practice systems using cd-i in that time
My driver's ed class used LaserDiscs...and this was in 2015.
Thanks again for letting me be a small part of the video. I appreciate it!
Thank you for being a part of it! You're parts made the video better as a whole!
CD-i: is mentioned
the Nintendo games that became and endless source of YTPs and memes: whomst has awaken the ancient ones
Oh yes. I could remember that. Even I used a very little bit of it in my own very first YTP. And would probably stay that way as I actually like Link.
Nintendo actually had nothing to do with them. They simply licensed the characters (not the series, but the characters) to Phillips as part of their agreement to develop a CD addon for the SNES. That's why the games don't use The Legend of Zelda, or Super Mario Bros names. They didn't have the rights to that. They only had the rights to Link, Zelda, Mario, Luigi, and Peach IIRC. Just the characters themselves. And Nintendo had zero involvement in the games.
The irony of watching this on a Philips 31.5" 4K monitor.
"Lamp oil, rope, bombs. You want it, it's yours my friend, as long as you have enough rupees"
"This peace is what all true warriors strive for."
"sorry link, I can't give credit. come back when you're a little, HMMMMMMM, richer."
Ah, Morshu..
"Lucky shot!"
dopy
"VHS was incapable of S-video by its very nature". This isn't true. It's just that most players didn't have the port. The signal is recorded on the tape as separate luma and chroma signals (as separate FM signals being recorded through the same head), though, and a Super-VHS deck can certainly output those from a normal VHS tape. (As can some higher-end VHS decks that may be out there)
Coderjo yeah, that was a “wait, what” moment for me as well. The s-video standard was originally made for VHS. Almost every VCR I’ve owned since S-VHS has that port and it helps greatly with standard VHS tapes depending on the TV.
There are more bulls**t facts in this video unfortunately :/
@Coderjo while chroma and luma are stored separately on VHS, their bandwith is so low that there's no gain to be made. Besides, what's used as source here is a composite video one, so even though it's stored separately on the tape, it's still for all intense and purposes, composite video. because the deck sees composite video and it then separates it for storage. It's not as if you're inputing S-video on the tape... even if you use an S-video input. The best VHS players players do not even have S-Video output. If we look at the reference, which is probably Sony's SVO line of broadcast-grade decks, the SuperVHS models do not produce as good a picture as the standard deck equipped with composite only. for regular VHS tapes.
Super VHS = S-VHS
s -VHS output had the purpose of getting higher resolution in the TV from super VHS tapes . At that time, many televisions had bad filters, which may have resulted in a resolution of 330 lines. although the most exclusive televisions they had something called digital comb filter that could provide up to 380 line resolution in practice. And the difference you saw in the test image. now it could even say the smallest pattern in the test image. even super VHS recorders had comb filters in their tuners
I remember when I got my Sega CD I went around to all of the music stores and asked for CD+G albums and no one had any idea what I was talking about
I did exactly them same thing, never found any.
@@someoneontheinternet3090 I have one CD + graphics it’s The Jimi Hendrix Experience “Smash Hits”. I remember it came in a long box with a hype sticker “CD +” with extra graphics! I did get to watch the graphics once on my drummers big entertainment set up around 1990. I think it’s fun.
I remember seeing a CD-i in my high school's art class. My teacher used it to show art stuff. Heh, a few people played video games on it. I remember its TV ads.
I remember my Weird Al - Running with scissors CD had a like short movie on it and I watched it over and over again. ALSO: Back in 1999 I had a Power Mac 6100 w/DOS card and in order to play mpeg videos I used the Weird Al CD. The CD had a Quicktime MPEG extension (in order to play movies) and I copied it to the extensions folder in MacOS. I remember using random CD-ROM's for the extensions that they came with. You have to remember that in the 80's and 90's a lot of Mac formatted CD-ROM's were also start up discs because even back then hard drives and plenty of storage space were not in everyone's computer. Those System Folders on those discs were awesome cause you could copy them and boot up your mac with a burned CD or external SCSI Iomega Zip and Jazz drives. [crying like a baby] "I miss my old Macintosh collection"
I have that Weird Al CD with the SECRET FILE! folder/directory. I was excited when I found it myself (kind of like when I found the undocumented MS-DOS command TRUENAME).
Those random System Folders found on CDs i used to be able to get from the library were a godsend for troubleshooting when I tinkered a little too much as a kid. Collecting different versions of extensions included with software and trying all of them out was a fun past time
The Korn life is peachy album has the adidas video on it, pretty awesome discovery, made me go thru all my cds back in the day and tried them on my computer trying to find something else
Mike L what I hate is how many of those have programs that just play songs or videos off websites that ceased to exist years ago and are now completely useless
@@syloui DUDE! me too, I would bring home another old macintosh system and use some random CD or CD-ROM as a boot disc. I remember when I came across the Quicktime-MPEG extension. I was so stoked cause I was now able to watch videos on my mac. I think I had the PowerMac 6100/66 with the DOS card and Windows 95 on it at some point. Apple's OS were so easy to install and troubleshoot, lol that all changed with OS X.
The soundtrack on the 2D Zelda CDi games is actually really good and is a thing many people overlook. Check it out it’s really cool and the best part of the game.
And the Gameplay!
one day there will be a youtube channel named "The 64-bit Guy"
when everyone else using quantum computer
And there will be a "Quantic bit guy" when computers will be "MEME energy powered"
Adrian Zanoli hmm... how much power can you harvest from memes?
I mean a funny meme will make you laugh, and laughing takes energy, so could you show people memes to make them laugh, then harvest the energy they spend while laughing and use that to power a computer?
It’s probably the least efficent way you could ever harvest energy, but it’s possible.
@@adrianzanoli wait, your computer isn't powered by memes yet? Do you work in a museum or something?
@@loganiushere watch Monsters Inc.
Or will have "The8BitGuy Daughter" doing this.
I remember an art lesson where the teacher wheeled out a TV on a trolley with a CD-i player and showed us a number of paintings on a Photo CD to explain a few things. Would work better today with a big screen and HD but it was just about sufficient at the time! Very slow navigation though, I remember that. I guess that would've been around 1994 or 1995.
Laserdisc was often used in this role as well. When I got a couple of LD players that were lying around my high school, it came with CAV disks, each frame of which was a photo for the science teacher to display on the TV.
@@CODMarioWarfare the only time I've ever seen a laserdisc was the player for the Domesday project for which it was the data storage format - it being a bit before the CD-ROM. A cunning mixture of data and video content, those things. And so big and shiny! I was much impressed.
CODMarioWarfare I used to have an encyclopedia on a LaserDisc that worked like that.
9:16 I remember most DVD players _not_ being capable of playing VCD's. I remember in 2002 we finally got a new Sony model to replace our horrible KLH player and it had VCD compatibility. I was in love with it because I had a lot of low quality Simpsons episodes and I would use Nero to burn them to VCD's and watch them whenever. We were 4 years away from getting a DVD burner. Nero was great because it allowed you to make your own menus for VCD's albeit they were limited, no cursor support, you could place 9 choices on a menu (VCD's could only fit so much anyways) and each was assigned a number but with clever graphic tricks you could make some really nice looking menus.
I remember using nero as well, to make Photo CD's , VCD's and burn music CD's , fantastic software
Fun fact: VCDs are popular in most Asian countries (e.g. Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapora, China and the Philippines).
the first dvd players in general were hit or miss in regards to reliability
I remember it so well also! So “advanced!” Such cutting edge tech! Magical! But what a fail... too fancy and expensive for its day...
Ok
@Lassi Kinnunen Hmmm the games look great on my 29inch Trinitron
I'm enjoying it alot
@@puppetmaster634 why do people like you even comment on anything? It’s beyond the bare minimum, and you offer absolutely nothing
@@ocelot_the_dragon true. If you don't have something to add then just don't comment
"Nice of the 8-Bit Guy to make a video about the CDi, eh Luigi?"
"I hope he includes us in the video!"
"Luigi, look!"
(Gets the letter on the wall)
"It's from TH-cam!"
I remember that they showed video on one of these in a store and and I was very impressed with the pure colors in the picture. much cleaner colors than on VHS and even live analogue TV. in Europe, Philips used scart RGB. thus a cable connection that separated red green and blue. And of course the TV would have a black screen and the screen would be flat
A SCART cable also has pins for composite and S-video signals. Some cables don't even have all of the 21 pins connected - if the source was VHS, for example, it doesn't matter because the cable/connector can't make the original source signal any better.
With DVD you could get true RGB signal, so the high-quality SCART cable is needed (if one doesn't go with component video, VGA or HDMI of course).
13:48
"you missed that one, try another"
nice schüt
th-cam.com/video/4XXMs3FO50M/w-d-xo.html
vineErnhern try another
jermaPluto
I'm glad that I'm not the only one who thought of this!
Mario: Nice of the princess to invite us over for a picnic, eh, Luigi?
Luigi: I hope she made lots of spaghetti!
Mario:Hey Peach!
Peach:hi. *gives spaghetti and PIZZA PIE*
ALL TOASTERS TOAST TOAST!
Mario: Luigi, look!
*In earrape*
NICE OF THE PRINCESS TO INVITE US OVER FOR A PICNIC *_GAY_* LUIGI?
I HOPE SHE MADE LOSTA SPAGHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEETI
With Spicy Meatballs! 😁
I loved that Information Society album. Since I was a big Star Trek fan I loved that they incorporated lines from the old series in their songs
OMG you answered a life long question I always had. I remember playing Tetris at a block buster demo station when I was a kid and I thought it was so cool with its realistic background and nice music. and I never knew what console that was and years later assumed it was PS1, well a couple years later when I got a PS1 I bought several tetris' trying to find that one but never did and eventually gave up. But now I know!
CD+G was much more common for karaoke, and is still used for that to this day.
I remember music with graphics was attempted again in the mid 2000s with DVD audio. It was supposed to have surround sound, lyrics, and often music videos. I remember when Weird Al's album "Straight Outta Lynnwood" came in the short lived "Dual Disc" format, where one side was the CD and the other DVD-A. Pretty sure I only used the DVD side once. I hated that format and was glad it died. It didn't work in some CD players, and it felt heavier than an average disc so I'm sure it caused extra strain on the players that it did work in. Ended up burning a 1:1 copy of the CD side so I could play it in more devices. Dave if you ever want to do a video on the DualDisc format I'll gladly provide you some material lol.
Weird Al seems to have been somewhat of a pioneer in weird new formats.
Enhanced cds lol… I have a lot of those and never once utilized it lol
@@X_Baron well he is Weird 🤣
I remember working on the early versions of Cluedo (Clue in the US). It was a horrid system to work on.. It was unmodified OS/9 and the tools were very immature, we basically had to rewrite everything from the CD mastering software to the SDK because the supplied stuff from philips was.. bad..
In those days to burn a CD (a blank cost £50) you had to master it to raw* format and send it directly to the burner (from a Sun Workstation supplied by Philips, no internet back then though).. which was bolted to an external wall to stop vibration, and if a lorry went past it'd destroy the burn.. we wasted a *lot* of money on bad burns.
When I left we were still working on trying to get the board (a graphic about 4 times bigger than the memory!) to stream piecemeal off the drive without it stuttering. No idea if they ever fixed that.. I've never actually seen a finished version.
* Really raw - you had to prescramble it.. data on a CD isn't written the way it's read, the bits are moved around to help reliability, there are prescribed inter block and gaps, etc. When a modern CD talks about 'raw' reading they're not really at all, since that layer is built in to the hardware now.
I'm surprised it was so heavily marketed in the US... never saw an advert for it in the UK, it mostly sat around in the back of Tandy next to the CD+G machine.
By the time I stopped working on it CD-ROM was starting to become a thing, and although it still required expensive video decoders (and eyebleedingly expensive encoding - remember PCs couldn't even decode at the time let alone encode, so you had to send video off to agencies to have it encoded) it was kind of obvious where the market was going.
hi i just want to say for all the difficulties in producing the cluedo games they were really good for their times and whoever cast the live action scenes got really good actors like joan simms and angus mcinnes . i seem to recall was in a game for british petroleum making the grade??? i used to have that years ago although it never worked well on my cdi.
I remember the show "Double Dare" on Nickolodeon had a Maganavox CD-i version for the winners back in the 90's
This was an amazing and exciting back in the days, I've had a chance to use a full Philips set when I lived in The Netherlands around 1997, CD-i, TV, receiver and all bells and whistles. Brings great memories.. Thank you for mentioning it!!!
For more details on all these different CD standards, the Technology Connections channel has an excellent video on all the different rainbow book standards.
11:17 - David (along with all of us) has forgotten how leisurely front-load VHS players' loading merchanisms were.
Chris Lewis yeah, he was jamming that sucker in there lol.
On some VCRs you have to push in the tape almost all the way by hand, while on others all you need to do is give it a slight nudge and then it will automatically pull the tape is. Looks like he was used to the former type but was using the latter type of VCR.
Hehe true. Just let the machine do it's robotic stuff. Awesome devices!
"It was never really intended to be a video game console...It was supposed to be a media center for your living room. Sort of like XBox One of the day." (c)
i read that right as he said it
OH my, so many memories. The CD-i was my de-facto "computer" / games console when I was in my late teens. That was the time before Desktop PCs were a little more affordable. Even then the unit was rather expensive when it was purchased for me as a present. When I think about how much it was sold for at a flea market a few years ago just to clear out space at my parents' house, it makes me cry a little bit inside. And no, it wouldn't have been realistic for me to hang on to it, despite the memories.
And as pointed out, it wasn't just a gaming platform. I had some other more educational CD-is which were great like a guitar learning disc I forgot the name of, I had an encyclopedia I think and a video CD of Queen's music videos from Greatest Hits 1 and 2. My favourite game was Flashback, which is a sequel to Another World. One of the few games I actually finished. There was some kind of dinosaur one I can't recall the name of (Lost Eden, had to google it) which was quite good, and yes some others were not as good but it was a fun diverse platform.
Can't disagree on the controller though, it was rather poor. Though mine was slimmer than the one you demonstrated, probably because it was a continental Europe model, which also used the SCART socket system at the back instead of those antenna ports (I think).
Thanks for this episode Dave, that was a good trip down memory lane :)
I played Lost Eden on pc! Thought it was great back then, but when I recently watched a let's play of it, I realized it has not aged gracefully...
Jean-Loup Rebours-Smith i feel sorry for you
@@goclunker lol, why exactly?
Did the Queen disc allow you to interact with the music, or was it just music videos on a VCD? I ask because Peter Gabriel and Todd Rundgren each put out actual CD-i specific releases where you were able to interact with and manipulate the music and video.
@@danieldaniels7571 As far as I recall they were just a catalogue of their music videos, no interaction there. I do remember something from Peter Gabriel now that you mention it though
Last time I was this early the airport still was an integral part of your network...
SVCD comes to mind. From what I remember it was somewhat popular over in Asia, had a resolution of 480x480, the video was encoded using MPEG-2, and it was produced on CD media.
I literally bought a CDI yesterday, cannot wait for it to arrive.
Did you make sure it works. Apparently CDi's are notorious for not lasting this long. Apparently some of the components (maybe the capacitors or the on board battery) are prone to degrade.
@@fattiger6957 Apparently the tray and spindle need repair, but that's a simple fix. I think its always more fun to have a project though as opposed to something that works straight out of the box. I'm dreading the timer chip repair though.
@João Maverick A Phillips cd-i 210.
8-bit guy Made video about Philips Cd-i
My brain:
*I h o p e s h e M a d e l o t s o f s p a g h e t t i !*
Op
Great video guys. I agree 100% regarding the Tetris port. On kind of a fun note I wanted to mention that I have the Phillips CD-i Tetris soundtrack on vinyl. It is one of my favorite records in my collection. Just nothing but pure 90's nostalgia, great calming music.
That's a gem of a record. I have those songs burned into my brain.
i remember that GameSack also praised CD-i's Tetris, because of the Yani's music hahaha
If only this technology had been more successful, we'd have a sequel to the award winning CD-i Zelda by now.
It did it was sold and became the playstation one
Weren't there already 2 of them?
If you want a worthy sequel, just take a dump in a paper bag.
@@Gideon_Judges6 yep only 2 and no more, theres no need to look for anything else because there were only ever 2
well we have a spiritual successor now
BurnCycle was amazing. And the Art titles were very, very, good: Harvest of the Sun, for example. It had its time. We were lucky to have the experience in the 90s, and being here to remmember, in the 2020's.
I'd just like to point out that, like Dragon's Lair, Mad Dog Mccree was in the arcade first. Thanks for this comprehensive and admirably objective look at the CD-i, I learned a lot.
Loved the video, Dave!
But I am afraid you still have a misconception about VHS. It stores luma and chroma separate. You can indeed output it as s-video, it's not "impossible." Apart from S-VHS devices there were other VHS devices with s-video output such as Hi8/VHS tandem machines. The Sony SLV-T2000MN is a good example. What you mean to say is that the compression on chroma is very high, and that quality at the source is similar for composite video and what is obtainable from VHS. Outputting it through real world cables and mixing signals (!) in one case is a totally different story. The whole concept of component video signals, to which s-video also belongs, relies in keeping signals separate.
Saying that luma and chroma are separate is stupid and wrong. They are part of one single signal on VHS and on SVHS both, just like composite.
However on composite, chroma is encoded on top of luma, corresponding to the broadcast format, but downconverted for channel independence. On VHS and SVHS, this encoding would not be stable or suitable, so it's the other way around, called colour-under, the luma signal is upshifted on top of chroma instead. So indeed S-Video connection for both VHS and S-VHS makes technical sense, since it allows to avoid merging and separating these signals an extra couple times.
Yeah, he lost me there too. All high end VHS VCRs has S-Video output on them, and anyone who had decent home theater systems back then knew it made a noticeable difference to use it.
@Boojakascha while chroma and luma are stored separately on VHS, their bandwith is so low that there's no gain to be made. Besides, what's used as source here is a composite video one, so even though it's stored separately on the tape, it's still for all intense and purposes, composite video. because the deck sees composite video and it then separates it for storage. It's not as if you're inputing S-video on the tape... even if you use an S-video input. The best VHS players players do not even have S-Video output. If we look at the reference, which is probably Sony's SVO line of broadcast-grade decks, the SuperVHS models do not produce as good a picture as the standard deck equipped with composite only. for regular VHS tapes.
@@FinalBaton Luma has a high bandwith. VHS tapes were also used to store PC data on Luma.
@@Boojakascha its still pretty low bandwith, compared to a full luma signal like that of SVideo. I think it's like halved OTTOMH. My point still stands : SVideo outputs on VCRs do not make good use of the color under separate storage of VHS. They don't look better than composite out from a reference broadcast VCR.
yours is one of the best channels on youtube. thanks for the effort spent here.
I remember wanting this thing as a kid, until I saw the price.
14:17 I used to love Richard Scarry growing up, mainly because of Busytown! :D
2:56 James Rolfe also complaining about these port location.
*_Nice of the princess to invite us over for a picnic at Micro Center, eh Luigi?_*
*_I hope she made lots of computers!_*
*_Luigi, look! It's from GameStop!_*
*_"Dear Pesky Plumbers, the Koopalings and I have taken over the Mushroom Kingdom. The princess is now a permanent guest at one of my seven Koopa GameStops. I dare you to find her if you can!"_*
*_We gotta find the Princess!_*
*_And you gotta help us!_*
We forgot The Good Guys, Circuit City & Comp USA!
I remember they had a tent set up for the CDi at the second Wooodstock, I still have the badge they gave out.
"What were they thinking!?!?"
Ask Nintendo
AVGN reference?
@@newtype5005 Finally!
@@newtype5005 no, mao tse tung's
TH-cam Poop. Where there’s smoke, they pitch back.
Me: *in quarantine* Gee, it sure is boring around here. I wonder what 8-Bit Guy's up to?
I don’t think enough. The hospital beds in New York and New Jersey are almost full according to multiple sources.
theone Andonly you might rethink that sheep statement. As of today there are now more confirmed Coronavirus cases in the US than China or Italy, and NYC has so many deaths from it that they’re having to put tents outside their hospitals to use as temporary morgues. But yeah, you have the constitutional right to ignore the warnings. You do you...
the AVGN episode was focused on the Bad .. Well that's his thing, that's the show . I always knew there was some Playable games On the CDi. its not as bad as it seems. but Never for 700$ that's why almost no one had one at home
Still looks bad to me. Even the so called "hidden gems" look average at best.
Yep, I remember reading about the CDi in game magazines at the time, between the absurdly high price point, the lack of focus or vision for what the device was supposed to be (no one really knew what to make of a "multimedia center" back then") and a severe lack of third party support (again, no one knew what to make of it which mean developers didn't know what to make *for* it), it died a swift and quiet death.
It didn't help that the systems were massively underpowered compared to contemporary hardware like PCs and some next-gen gaming consoles, especially for the price point the CDi was being sold at, and that lack of power meant that the consoles around the corner - Sega Saturn, Nintendo 64, Playstation - were already destined to outperform (both in terms of sales and hardware performance) the CDi at nearly half the price.
Ultimately, the console was a victim of being overly ambitious with a relatively new technology that just wasn't advanced enough to be cost effective or desirable for the average consumer.
correct me if i'm wrong but this was well before the first playstation came
@@Dargonhuman CD-i was not just about games with great graphics. It was educational programs and films
@@Andersljungberg That's a large part of why it failed too; it was completely unfocused on what kind of machine it wanted to be and the average consumer wasn't going to spend that much money on what they saw as a glorified game console. By that point, most households already had DVD players for educational films and desktop PCs and Macs of the same price could do everything the CD-i could do and more, especially in terms of educational programs; most people saw it as an underpowered game console with some extra bells and whistles.
Hey! You showed a clip of the "Atlantis: The Last Resort" game, which I wrote when I worked at Philips Research Labs in Redhill, UK. Glad you showed that as it was very fun and very challenging to write!!!
Ah yes, exactly what I needed during my self isolation. Thank you David!
😆 yup same here
I used to make VCDs back in the day and play them on my DVD player. Fun fact: since DVDs are encoded with MPEG-2, some DVD players even supported non-standard VCDs encoded in MPEG-2, meaning better picture quality than a standard MPEG-1 VCD.
Indeed. I used to make VCDs as well so I could play movies on my DVD player. And yes, I made the "XVCD" as well, which used twice the resolution and MPEG2 since my player supported it.
I remember when DVD players started to support MPEG4 DivX encoded CDs, it was a DVD quality movie on a CD. However in recent years I see full HD movie of Bluray quality fit on a single CD by using mkv matroshka codec, I don't know how is this even possible.
those were called SVCD's
Actually the photo format on a cd-i was really brilliant : it contained one foto in different sizes in one file. The smallest first. And the cool thing was that the next up in size was actually only adding pixels to the smaller one. And so on.
So you get more and more detail the longer you wait. And can see the full image quickly in raw format.
Really concept that I didn't see back in most new image formats.
So it’s basically progressive decoding? Neat!
"CD-I wasn't bad, it was just AVGN video making everyone think it was bad!"
Uh, no, it really was awful as a videogame console. A few half-decent games and ports don't make up for the dozens upon dozens of horrid games.
Yeah he need anger management
@@FadingBulb57227 AVGN is just a comedie, not a serious reviews. James Rolfte is not really angry as a normal person who get married and live like a normal been. The AVGN is just his false character play by James -- a invented character who represent some players who have angry issues.
Yeah, the Nerd is right. CD-I games are mostly shit. There might be some half decent games hidden in there but that's a lot of garbage to dig through to find them. The Game Grumps did full play through of both Zelda games and boy are they bad. Between poor controls, terrible animations, and bad game design, the CD-I is not a gaming platform.
That's the real problem with judging it as a gaming platform, it really wasn't one.
@@ChadKimberly01 The real issue was that it wasn't really great at what it was trying to do either, it didn't really replace VCRs because it couldn't record, and there was already another better established video format for home theater enthusiasts that had better quality. It didn't really replace computers either because it couldn't do any productivity tasks like word processing or spreadsheets, and nobody outside of a few educational institutions was buying computers solely to run multimedia software.
Rather odd to advertise the thing as a VCR replacement when it can't play movies out of the box and can't record TV shows under any circumstances at all. Betamax would be preferable, even in 1990.
To cdi yes, to standard vhs no
@@flavortown3781 That's what I meant. In 1990 there was no reason to get betamax instead of VHS, and yet beta was still better than the CD-i.
@@Ralph-yn3gr and laserdisc as even better, and lot of laserdisc players could do CD+G at that point too.
@@kidthorazine No, because the point is VCRs could record.
Yes. The CD-I was a failure on so many fronts. The video is all too kind and nostalgic. It was never even decent. Philips had a lot of wishful thinking...
“Sears which doesn’t sell any electronics anymore, but that’s a topic for another episode.”
Little did I know that it would be an actual episode about America’s electronics stores.
Lol I was just thinking that
I think CD-I was a novel concept but a bit too early for the market. I’ve never considered it to be a game console, but more as an edutainment system. I tend to see it as a prototype for DVD, the movies on CD where a good idea, as DVD proved to be very successful. Just like the commodore CDTV, the storage capacity of CD-roms offered a lot of potential but developers did not really know how to use it effectively as they where sort of testing the waters. The Sega Mega CD’s best feature in my opinion is the red book CD audio which when used well can really enhance the game like for instance Ecco the dolphin. But the playstation proved that optical media where inevitably the future, a boat that Nintendo missed out on in that transitional era.When I first saw CD-I players, they where demonstrated in book stores with the Roller ball controller attached to it featuring some educational titles. As a kid I was quite fascinated by it. To me it did not appear as game console but more as a system for other types of games (primarily edutainment). It wasn't until around 1995 that I noticed Philips promoting it more as a games system. Sadly it's interactive multimedia features where not really carried over to DVD, maybe this was intentional? Oddly enough Blue ray disc has a Java based scripting Language that could replicated most (if not all) of CD-I's features but are not really utilised by publishers.
Based on another comment from a former CD-I developer, it seems that developers weren't uncertain how to utilize it, but rather prevented from pushing the limits of the device by way of the requirement for indefinite hardware backwards compatibility as part of the format standards. This device could have easily been the PlayStation had Phillips allowed for more growth in the format.
This was also the time where technology was really becoming more advanced year after year. As you said the problem was that a CD-i from 1995 is the same system as one from 1991. If you look at computers at the time, that 4 year gap is HUGE. 386 to Pentiums, RAM increasing at least four-fold, Hard Drives starting to go into the Gigabyte range, etc.
The thing about Video CDs, just like laserdiscs didn’t took off in America but was hugely successful in Asia, in-fact you can still buy contemporary movies on the format to this day.
I seem to recall the vcd and svcd was briefly popular in piracy circles before xvid came along and did to video what mp3 did to music...
14:40 "the original NES version is probably my favourite" *cough* Electronica 60M *cough*
I believe a lot of karaoke players still use the same CD-G tech to display lyrics as you sing.
And Laserdisc later got it as LD-G, mostly for Subtitles for Japanese releases of western films.
You are absolutely correct. All CD-based karaoke players use the CD+G format to embed the animated lyrics into the music.
Omg those videos that play behind karaoke songs do look like FMV cutscenes!
My old megacd played them as well. Apart from lyrics it wasnt very impressive. Was fun going through cds to see what random stuff was encoded on them, quite a few didnt advertise the cd+g bit at all.
Those karaoke players will also play the CD+G graphics from music discs. I have the Information Society, Jimi Hendrix, Fleetwood Mac and a sampler from Sega.
"nice of the princess to invite us over for a picnic, gay luigi?"
Luigi, look. It's from Bowser.
@@TonHet1 Dear pesky plumbers, the Koopalings and I have taken over this Kingdom
@@gab_v250 The princess is now a permanent guest at one of my seven Koopa hotels! I dare you to find her if you can!
@DiamondDude11 [Puro] and you've gotta help us!
IF YOU NEED INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO GET THROUGH THE HOTELS, CHECK OUT THE ENCLOSED INSTRUCTION BOOK.
Miss the VCD era. I had a portable CD player, just like a walkman, that could play VCD's. It was unbelievable, back when the smallest thing to play a VCD was the size of a VCR. The brand was NAPA. Some Japanese company.
7:54 Explaining how we got our films developed in the 90s... Now I feel old!
Omg that Tetris seems super relaxing. I wonder if the devs of Tetris Effect took inspiration from that.
Good video. It is a misunderstood piece of hardware generally. I believe it was also used massively in the UK (and presumably elsewhere in the world) within retail to run interactive information booths. For example in Boots there was a "Choose Your Shade of Lipstick" type kiosk that I believe ran on CDi hardware
Never knew CD-i was a thing until now. Really interesting look on some obsolete hardware that shaped DVD in some ways.
What rock have you been living under?
There was an entire hour long info-mercial on this , back in the 90s that I remember seeing.
The guy was being shown it and a girl 'help' was there to offer help.. if he said the word 'help' and.. er.. whatever.
@@xenxander I was born in 2003 so I'm not from that era
The fact that Tetris and Lemmings are both playable and enjoyable on the CD-i, show that even the more maligned consoles *can* have a few gems in their library.
But still, either do one thing really well and totally dominate (NES and PlayStation 1 vs Sega Genesis/32x/CD), or do everything mostly okay and skimp on nothing (VHS vs Betamax and CED).
Phillips CD-i focused on too much, too early, and did none of it very well. And nobody enjoys trying to eat a half-cooked turkey, no matter what it's stuffed with.
Hello there everybody.
I would like to share some words here.
Sincerelly, when i saw this system for the first time i really got astonished by it's quality.
Image was simply outstanding for that time standards. Yes, VHS, could do a bit better resolution, has more lines indeed, specially on PAL systems,
but, at the end of the day, the crispness of the audio, and the chroma was way better in the CD-i.
I remember to watch some Bryan Adams video again and again looking thru the glass of some store near my place, that had speakers outside.
For me was simply impressive, i had a C128 back then, and i only had some experience with the ST and the Amiga thanks to a great friend of mine.
However, both machines were not FMV capable. So it was like magic.
As Dave said, Philips never intended to make a games machine from the CD-i, but an interactive player for multimedia and multipurpose tasks.
In some aspects, CD-i was NOT fully understood by the main public. Many magazines treated it like a games console, which it wasn't.
System price was not exactly "popular", it was quite high.
CD Video was never an standard on western countries, so Philips failed there, it would have had a chance in asian countries since CD video had
quite a lot of popularity for some years.
Philips lost a great opportunity ruining the license for the Zelda and Mario games it got from their venture with Sony for the SNES-CD, after the failure,
they got permission from Nintendo to make some games. Zelda games for the CD-i are, how to say it, a complete atrocity... Hotel Mario was a so-so
game with some charisma that was quite playable if you had a gamepad, but, sincerelly, animations ruin the product overall.
That's because at the time, Philips didn't care a shit about videogames, remember that the CD-i had a very long production run, and ONLY at later stages,
Philips thought it could jump into the videogame market and grab a share there. Too late... They handed Mario and Zelda to poorly skilled teams, that
really made these promising titles a pile of garbage.
There was another Mario game in development, it looked quite good, it resembled me to Super Mario World, but it stopped at a very early stage for some
reason.
What could we say about the hardware?
By the time it hit the shelves, was quite promising, a 15mhz 16/32bit 68k compatible CPU, 1MB of RAM, Hi-Res capable, Hi-Color, 8 16bit PCM channels...
What went wrong here? First, the N68070 had a serious drawback, i can't remember the details, but as far as i can remember, it needed to use double cycle
in order to execute 68k instructions, so, if you don't code for native 070 instructions, the extra speed is lost.
Most of the ports for the CD-i are poorly done, as a result, games, can be "slightly worse" than their Amiga counterparts.
Remember that the CD-i didn't use sprites, so it was more like an Atari ST with steroids and digital audio.
Flashback, Lemmings, Defender of the Crown, Lords of the Rising Sun, Litil Divil, and Striker are example of this, they are somehow a bit worse
than on the Amiga... They're quite playable though, i believe it's because they didn't optimize the code in order to port them to the Philips.
On the other hand, there are a couple of titles, like Lucky Luke and The Apprentice (specially this second one) that really show what the CD-i was capable of.
It's a pity that the system was not understood by the main public, games were in the most of the cases done by unskilled teams, and there's no scene at
all for this console... It had very interesting features, there were even a limited "internet connection" and a keyboard available.
There was a lot of information about the system available, the documentation for this system is quite extense and Philips did a great work with it.
However, it seems no one is interested on the system that could be capable of some nice 16bit ports. Not even a single MOD player was developed for it
despite having better sound capabilities than the Amiga... Simply, scene doesn't exist, despite being a capable sytem.
The CD-i also doesn't seem to have much in terms of emulation. You CAN do it in MAME now, but it seems to require quite a bit of setup to get working. And there doesn't appear to be an actively developed alternative emulator, either. :/
11:34 "im beggining to sound like a broken record"
more like a scratched CD am i right? hehehe
CD plus Graphics was something I remember most about my SEGA CD! It came with a demo of CD+G including the Information Society song you played. My favorite part was Spock saying "pure energy". (Well at least I think it was Spock)
Ahhh them some good times.
Yes, they indeed sampled Spock saying "pure energy" from a Star Trek TOS episode for that song. I'm NOT a fan of sampling in songs like that.
I used to have a CD-I and the Phillips 3DO. Man what memories as a young gamer lol
The CD-i made it onto Guru Larry's list of consoles that are literally rotting away because the lithium batteries that it uses for saving are hard to replace.
therealhardrock So the system’s firmware was stored in volatile memory?
@@Claro1993 th-cam.com/video/41rivol-cxQ/w-d-xo.html Here's the explanation.
@João Maverick Yep. They're even how the "DVD" menus on VCD work, CD-i Bridge.
Be honest. If it wasn't for Link and Mario TH-cam Poops, you wouldn't have even heard of the CD-I.
No, I knew about the CD-I back then. It was too expensive and I was a Nintendo zombie anyway.
Or James Rolfe.
Cd-i wad heavily advertised back in the early 90s. I remember it clearly. At the time I doesn't know that they had a deal with Nintendo
Actually I first heard about the CD-i when Todd Rundgren made an interactive multimedia music CD for it in 1993.
I love how you guys somewhat make a positive review of this system. I love it.
Ah... The History that Nintendo wants to forget.
Especially the period with their partnership with Sony begrudgingly collapsed and resulted in the PlayStation which ended Nintendo’s dominance on the video game industry.
@@Claro1993 I would argue that Nintendo's dominance never actually ended, since their competition never turned a profit, all they really lost was attention.
@@handsomebrick Never made a profit???
Even if Sony sold every console they ever made at a loss (which they didn't since only the first few years of a console's life are sold at a loss) They have pulled in billions and billions in licensing fees. In case you didn't know, the purpose of business is to make money and no company would keep funding a division that loses money. There's a reason Sony has kept making consoles for 26 years. Hell, the Playstation division has been one of the few saving graces at Sony since people aren't buying their consumer electronics as much as they used to.
@@fattiger6957 They have very cut licensing fees to entice third parties, plus their attach rate is pretty bad which cuts licensing fees further, and they have many expenses which they hide such as paying for a lot of development tools and marketing, I suspect that the 2011-2012 crash was due to Sony starting to go broke and being unable to foot these costs anymore and selling a huge amount of their assets, they got into the console business because they assumed they could have an easy monopoly since the other big companies (Nintendo, Sega, Atari) were extremely small in comparison to them and they planned to leverage this monopoly for a general takeover of all media (big corporations are less concerned with profit than the ability to destroy their competition), that plan is now extremely dead but they can't pull out of video games now since the rest of their company is in ruins and they've sunk so much investment into it.
@@handsomebrick You don't think that maybe Sony was doing bad because sales of their TVs, cellphones, bluray players, etc were all down tremendous and their film studio constantly put out flops (with the exception of a few movies like Spider-Man) rather than the one division they report as being profitable. And don't tell me Sony is cooking their books to make PlayStation look better. They are a publicly traded company and they don't have the clout to cover up something so big.
14:59 - For just a brief moment I thought you were going to amaze us with an "S" spin. LOL ;)
Just bought my 1st CDI can't wait to actually play it
How you getting on with your cdi?
Gee, it sure is boring around here.
King: My boy, this peace is what all true warriors strive for!
Link: I just wonder what Ganon's up to.
Gwoman flies into the castle on his magic carpet*
Gwoman: Your majesty, Ganon and his minions have seized the island of Koridai!
King: Hmmm... How can we help?
Gwoman: It is written: Only Link can defeat Ganon.
Link: Great! I'll grab my stuff.
Gwoman: There is no time, your sword is enough!
Link (to Zelda): How about a kiss, for luck?
Zelda: You've got to be kidding!
*Gwoman and Link take to the skies on the magic carpet*
Gwoman: Squadala, we're off!
Link: Wow, what are all those heads?
Gwoman: These are the faces of Evil. You must conquer each.
Link: I guess I'd better get going.
Gwoman: Here is the map. Where to you wish to go?
I was just thinking of this line
The funny thing about the copyright strikes is that I can find that same album in youtube and hear it all.
The CD-I gets a bad wrap. People confuse it thinking it was a gaming console. It wasn’t. It was an all-in-one multimedia center that was designed to replace all your electronics on your tv (and that included gaming consoles). And when it first got released in 1993 it was actually quite groundbreaking. It just didn’t catch on because it was marketed wrong.
The CDG portion reminded me of the Sony copy protection malware boondoggle. Anyone remember that? Putting an audio CD in your computer drive could auto-launch software that messed up your cd rom drivers. Done intentionally. By Sony. As “copy protection”. And yes, it happened to me and the only way I knew to fix it at the time was to reinstall the OS.
I remember the infomercial for the Philips CD-I. It starred Clarissa’s dad. 😄
I did love mad dog mcree in the arcades,,, brilliant video,, you are reminding me of lost memory files, you are doing more than you may have first thought possible, it's amazing that an old computer or game can reignite a memory path❤️👍
Mitten Squad: Can you beat Hotel Mario using a light gun controller?
Mario: NO?
Me: watches tech videos
Also me: watches YTP’s
TH-cam: boy do we have a video for you
Yes
Huge mood.
Yes
Yes
Henry Andersen well that’s a mood
Oh man, I remember the photo CD. My dad was a serious aquarium hobbyist who ended up writing some books on tropical fish, and for those projects he ended up getting several of his rolls of film developed into Photo CD format to make the layout process easier for whoever he hired to do it. I remember being really impressed by the quality of the maximum resolution, the negatives were scanned in at something seemingly astronomical like 3000x2000 (this was back in the 1024x768 desktop resolution days).
They were the first recordable CDs I'd ever seen, a fact which astonished me at the time, since we were still a few years from consumer-accessible CD-writers.
Reason the CD-i got Nintendo-games is that after long having worked with Sony with what would've been the Nintendo Playstation, Nintendo decided they had gotten a bad deal and decided to cooperate with Philips instead. This betrayal caused Sony to decide to develop their own console and the rest is history.