omegalfa – The World of CD-i

Felix the Cat – Review

Thanks to Steep Haywire, without his charity and good graces the world would never be able to play this unreleased CD-i title! Not only did he share it with us, but he jumped through all of the hoops to try to get the best dump possible.
THANK YOU Steep Haywire!!

Also a Very Special Thanks to Seventy7 and his Preserve CD-i website for sharing every time with us titles in first hand.

Created by EMG Publishing, this game actually never got released to CD-i but Philips Media did gave the catalogue number 8100250 to the title, so it was meant to be released in 1995, but for some reason didn’t make it. Only the PC-CDROM got published by Philips Media in the same year, still a CD-i prototype version exists but was very well kept!
The Adaptation for CD-i was in charge by Gary McGroarty and the CD-i programmer was David Armstrong.
The complete game’s name is Felix the Cat’s Giant Electronic Comic Book.

Read the complete review!

Website Mega Improvement

The website is being improved at this moment (and since a few weeks now).
Slowly you will see some “little” changes that will definitely blowup the way you use to surf over the site for your searches. I am sure many of you have already noticed some changes…

This will take at least 4 months to conclude… but you can be sure you will enjoy it!
We will announce when it will be finished. For now, you will still be able to visit the website as normal.

Othello & Mega Maze catalogue numbers

If you take a closer look at both discs calatogue numbers, you will see they match. But as they are completely different titles, this can’t happen as Philips Media always gave unique numbers for each titles.
But there is more… Othello® and Mega Maze shares the same number twice.

Othello – Testing Phase 1 uses 8100083 (1993/11/26)
Mega Maze final release uses 8100083 (1993/09/13)

Mega Maze – Testing Phase 1 uses 8100163 (1993/03/04)
Othello® final release uses 8100163 (1993/??/??)

We will assume the final release title as the correct catalogue number.

This is not the first time we saw those kind of errors, look here.
Typo from Philips Media? A change of catalogue number in the middle of the way?
That is not a problem as we saw it and defined how to pass through this issue.

Digital Video Cartridge bottle opener and key-chain

MrData, posted on the Original CD-i Discord Server this picture!
He worked with one of his friends to create this absolutely gorgeous bottle opener and key-chain.
This is the image of the Digital Video Cartridge (DVC) logo used by Philips on many of the CD-i titles who required a player equipped with a DVC module to be able to play Full Motion Video games/movies or titles that required it.

You want one? Sorry…
Only 2 of them have been made by his creator, and the lucky owners are MrData and me (Merci beaucoup Monsieur Data).

To reach this final result, the original DVC logo (provided by Jorne / Mrii6 from the same server) to be worked digitally to get a better quality. It has been completely vectorized using affinity designer software and the final result is just wonderful! MrData, you can congratulate your friend!

Professional designers will of course find some differences from the original one, but come on… who cares?
It is an amazing detailed quality picture, required for the final application. Using a lower quality one on a printable object will result in a even lower final result quality.

Future possible prints? Who knows… for now, as said before, only 2 have been made. His creator doesn’t seams to be interested in selling as he just made them for fun.
I am waiting to receive mine and will post it on the site (forum) as soon as I put my hands on!

Seventy7 and Preserve CD-i project

Seventy7 became in a few months (since September 2020) an “incontournable” name of the CD-i scene.
He is a preservationist, witch means he is searching to get the original discs, and with a process using a specific software and hardware, gets the original data from each titles like official realize date, version, ring codes and also an image (ISO or BIN/CUE files).
As the Philips CD-i wasn’t properly preserved, he decided jump into this quest and started this quest… yes… a quest!

We all know the difficulty to complete a collection for this system as it was used for so many professional purpose beside the usual simple consumer, not counting the huge regional variants.

Still, with the growing interactive community and interest into this infamous system, many unknown or very rare titles started appearing from nowhere. Thanks to many of those people Seventy7 is slowly reaching his goal with 960 titles dumped so far.
The most famous pair is without any questions Blazers and Seventy7. In fact, Blazers has a gift to find titles from places nobody would think it could be possible… and Seventy7 is a pure machine when the subject is dumping and scanning… I named this pair, the Dream Team, you will find there names on many titles credits.
But there is more, UnlockerPT, he is a monster, eating more than 60 titles in just one week-end! I can easily confirm that as he is my neighbor here in Portugal (Grande Maluco! És o Maior!).
Seventy7 named a few on his dedicated blog:

Thanks to Blazers, KailoKrya, Landcross, retaliator, r******d, UnlockerPT, omegalfa, Jackal, Maddog, Fireball, Wiggy, Billy and many others for all your hard work!

All the dumps are available at Redump.org but now, all the romset are available on archive.org, thanks to him!

It is now my turn, thank you them, yes, thank you Seventy7, thank you Blazers, thank you UnlockerPT, thank you KailoKrya, thank you retaliator, thank you r******d, thank you Jackal, thank you Maddog, thank you Fireball, Thank you Wiggy, thank you Billy, thank you all!
Keep up the good work!