CD-i Emulation
Emulation is the term used when you want to make something work from a specific system, using something that is not the original platform.
In our case, play a CD-i title without the need of any dedicated player.
This quest isn’t new. Back to the early days of the interactive system development, Philips tried many ways to emulate CD-i titles to make it easier to develop new titles.
Its succeeded with the development of a Nubus CD-i board for Macintosh, an ISA & PCI boards for Sun and Windows computers.
Here you will find the different ways to emulate a CD-i title using a software, no boards (this is a future subject).
Some of them are abandoned by their creator, others are still under development.
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| Name | CD-ice |
|---|---|
| Stands for | CD-i Console Emulator |
| Author | Pete Dabbs |
| Latest Version | Initial DEMO release |
| Release Date | 20/08/2001 |
| Website | www.cdice.emuhp.com |
| Download | Try it! |
| Screenshots | |
| Description | Pete Dabbs worked on the CD-i conversion of Rise™ of the Robots. He was a coder for more that 15 years in the game industry. His passion to the CD-i and in particular to the game he worked on make him decided to do the first step to program the very 1st emulator that enables to play a CD-i title. CD-ice is known for emulating only one game, Rise™ of the Robots. But more titles are working still with some issues, known working titles are: Micro Machines, Escape from Cybercity®, Defender of the Crown, Zelda™ – The Wand of Gamelon, Flashback, Whack a Bubble, Lemmings, The 7th Guest, Striker Pro and Tetris®. |
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| Name | TinyCDI |
|---|---|
| Stands for | Tiny CD-i |
| Author | David Haywood |
| Latest Version | Version 1 |
| Release Date | 28/10/2009 |
| Website | www.mamedev.emulab.it/haze |
| Download | Try it! |
| Screenshots | |
| Description | This is a ‘Tiny’ MAME build containing the CD-i code from MESS using a fixed gamelist like MAME. Most games will lockup or crash at some point due to imperfectons in the emulation, a couple of them do however play well. Hotel Mario™, The Apprentice (no sound), Dimo’s Quest, Alien Gate, The Joker’s Wild™, Tetris® and a number of others seem to be perfectly playable. Digital Video titles won’t work because MESS doesn’t emulate the MPEG card. For most games only one revision has been added for testing purposes, while multiple revisions exist in the TOSEC dats. Non-games haven’t been added at all for now. I haven’t marked games as working / not working because most of them haven’t been tested far enough to make a good judgement on that, the main guarantee this tiny build gives however is that if your CHDs match the expected ones, you’re getting the same results as everybody else; something which is hard to know in MESS which lacks any kind of fixed set list. I (Haze) take no credit for the work here, I’ve just been converting images and testing them. The driver is mostly by “Just Desserts / Harmony” and progress can be followed at the MESS forums. The CHDs used by this should be compatible with future versions of MESS. The package is provided as a ‘tiny’ package which extracts over a full MAME source. |
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| Name | CD-i Emulator |
|---|---|
| Stands for | CD-i Emulator |
| Autor | CD-i Fan |
| Latest Version | 0.5.2, 0.5.3-beta4 |
| Release Date | 30/09/2005, 08/07/2018 |
| Website | www.cdiemu.org |
| Download | Try it! |
| Screenshots | |
| Description | The CD-i Emulator program provides a fairly complete software emulation of the hardware of an actual physical CD-i player.You can download a time-limited edition, but I ask a modest payment for the unlimited edition.The time-limited edition emulates for at most three minutes between CD-i player resets and does not support permanent saving of NVRAM data such as game highscores and other CD-i title settings. The unlimited edition does not have these restrictions. The version 0.5.3 beta releases are limited editions, unless you have already activated an unlimited edition on your machine or you’re using a Philips Mono-I player system ROM (200 F1, 210 F1, 220 F2). In order to actually run CD-i software, the emulator needs copies of the CD-i system ROMs. These ROMs are copyrighted and cannot be freely redistributed, but you can easily obtain them via the serial port of a physical CD-i player using the CD-i Link program.The World of CD-i is proudly the official tester of CD-i emulator. All titles testes are done by BurnCycle. Each title have his compatibility rated, just search for a title on the site. Don’t hesitate to contact him for compatibility questions. Check the titles list compatibility. |
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| Name | MAME |
|---|---|
| Stands for | Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator |
| Author | Open-Source |
| Latest Version | 0.208 |
| Release Date | 27/03/2019 |
| Website | www.mamedev.org |
| Download | Try it! |
| Screenshots | |
| Description | MAME is a multi-purpose emulation framework. MAME’s purpose is to preserve decades of software history. This is achieved by documenting the hardware and how it functions. The source code to MAME serves as this documentation. The fact that the software is usable serves primarily to validate the accuracy of the documentation. Over time, MAME (originally Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) absorbed the sister-project MESS (Multi Emulator Super System), so MAME now documents a wide variety of (mostly vintage) computers, video game consoles and calculators, in addition to the arcade video games that were its initial focus. MAME is capable of useful CD-i emulation using the cdimono1 driver for Philips Mono-I player ROMs. |
Pete actually used the CD-Ice source code in 2011 to get Frog Feast running on CD-Ice without any problem. Pete’s final CD-i efforts were in that same year when he was trying to code something new on CD-i using CD-Ice, but it never worked out.
The TinyCD-i effort is very limited and not really recommended (moreover, based on MAME). Fairly emulation is possible by using MAME itself, but it’s (in my opinion) pretty difficult to get it running. There are some nive youtube tutorials for that. CD-i Emulator has at least the bigest potential, as I don’t think MAME will get big updates anytime soon (and no chance to see DVC in action using MAME). Nice overview, Omegalfa,
I am not an emulator fan, all emulators meaning.
I do prefer a real native machine, no lag, no bugs.
But the emulator is a very important part of all gaming industry.
CD-i speaking, it helps to avoid burning disc over and over to try new revisions of a title that is being developed.
CD-i Fan is doing an incredible job with his emulator, and he is always listening to burncycle opinions tests.
Actually he tries to solve minor bugs right after a new test information.
It’s almost an “on time” fix.
Futur of the CD-i emulator is bright!