Philips CD-i, The multimedia future that never was.

The compact discs we all know were invented by Philips and Sony and released in 1982 and for eight years the format was used primarily for audio only. The CD-ROM for computers was also invented in the late 1980s, but was not really seen. There was a lot of penetration into the consumer market until the 1990s, so for most of the decade CDs were sold alongside cassette tapes and vinyl records as a high-end music format; However, Philips believed that the format could be useful for more than just audio and audio. 1990 they introduced the CD I player (I stands for interactive) and it was advertised as the CD player that works with your TV.

The CD I player was originally sold for seven hundred and ninety-nine dollars in the US market, but was quickly reduced to a more reasonable price of $599. They were available at most retail stores that sold electronics at the time, such as Best Buy. and Micro Center from the now defunct Incredible Universe and Sears, which doesn't even sell electronics anymore, but that's a topic for another episode, I was always a kid. I'm a little obsessed with the CD, I just saw it in gaming magazines and a lot of people don't remember that the magazines included articles about the Philips CDI and its games, and you know when you're eleven years old, a twelve year old kid and I Spy, you know these amazing graphics, especially because they were using a lot, so for these games, you know, it looked mind-blowing, so this was my CDI.

I wanted it when it came out, which was like the early '90s I was in. third grade and I had insomnia so I saw the infomercial and it hit me in a weak spot and I was really convinced that I needed this and I tried to convince my dad to call this number now to receive the complete magnetic cd-i player with digital video cartridge, let's take a quick look at the hardware. This is a Philips CDI 200, but it was also sold under the Magnavox brand. It looks a lot like a normal CD player of the time.

On the front there is a small hidden panel and on the inside there is a port for a wired controller now, while all new CDI players ship with a wireless controller. I don't actually have one, but I do have this one, which was probably the most common wired controller. It has a d-pad in the middle, but it's not very good with one and two buttons on the side, it's fine for operating some titles with one hand, but in many of them you end up having to use your other hand on one of the buttons, not a very good gaming controller, luckily they made it later.

I come out with a controller similar to a Sega Genesis and this one works much better for gaming. They also made a rolling ball and a mouse, but I don't have any of those to show, of course, right now there is a huge shortage of CDI controllers and I don't know why, but there are more CDI players than controllers. Fortunately, you can get tips like this that will allow you to use a standard 15-pin controller from your PC. That's always an option, let's take a look behind this so-called input 2 which is actually for a second controller if you have a two player game for example, it's an irritating place to put it and this is a digital audio output for High-end stereo systems and quite rare at the time. actually it was something quite new and here it is of course the standard stereo audio and composite video jack and it had s-video output, also something quite new at the time and probably only supported by very high end televisions unfortunately I suspect 90% of CDI users in 1990 were probably forced to use the RF antenna jacks just as a VCR would have had to use at the time.

Let's open it and take a look inside. Take a look at the logic board which you will be able to notice right away. That it's running on a 6800 7o CPU at first sounds pretty impressive for those who are familiar with the naming scheme of the Motorola 68000 series of processors, you might be tempted to think that a 68o7o would fit in right after the 6800 six. Oh, but no, it's actually a custom version that is more similar and designed for the original 68,000, meaning it's a 16-bit CPU with some 32-bit capabilities, although it runs at 15.5 megahertz, so which is twice as fast as an Amiga 500.

For example, the new player was actually designed with many different types of media and of course the device could play standard music CDs which were very common at the time and these discs They usually had the Compact Disc digital audio logo printed on them, however, the CD I player also opened up a whole new world of compact disc media types, including the most graphics CD, the photo CD, the video CD that should not be confused with the video CD, which is actually a type of laser disc that contains analog data and is not supported here and of course the compact disc interactive or CDI The CDI player today is often considered a failed video game console , but it was

never

actually intended to be a video game console, at least not at first, it was supposed to be a media center for your living room. as if the Xbox will one day replace your CD player and your VCR and your encyclopedias and your photo albums and of course your video game console and possibly even your computer, so let's examine each of these types of media a little more close up.

Since the compact disc was the focus of the system, it's a given that regular music CDs will play fine here; In fact, if you had this connected to your home entertainment system, you wouldn't even need to turn on your TV. use the music CD feature, but you may have wanted to turn on the TV for those music CDs because I'm about to show you something that I bet 90% of you have probably

never

seen or heard of before, but what I have here. it's just a regular music CD, at least that's how it appears on the surface and this is the exact same CD that a person could have bought at Best Buy Walmart Music Land or whatever and played it on their portable music players or on your computer.

CD players in their cars or even on their home stereo, but if I put it in the CD player, something magical happens now. I'd love to let you listen to the music that goes along with this, but we all know that if I played more than two or three seconds of copyrighted music, I'd get a copyright strike from YouTube, so at the moment I'll have to let you see the graphs here, well I'll tell you a little bit about how this worked, you'll see the music. encoded on a CD has multiple different subchannels that are read along with the music data being transmitted on CD.

The graphics are stored in some of the unused subchannels and since it is a data stream you can't actually use it to immediately throw a full image on the screen at once, the data is basically displayed on the screen as that are read, the interesting thing is that the data stream can indicate where these particular pixels are supposed to go, allowing them to modify specific places on the screen. and in some cases they even animate small sections. In this case they use it to show the lyrics of the song that go along with what you are listening to, which again makes me sad because I can't let you listen to the music with these graphics.

They are limited to a resolution of around 300 by 216 pixels using a maximum of 16 colors, so this puts it in the same ballpark as many computer systems and game consoles from the 1980s, which makes sense since they are developed in the 1980s anyway, even if it didn't appear on the market until 1990, well, this CD here is not kind enough to inform you that it has graphics, check it out, this is one of my favorite albums of the era and it actually has a little logo here that actually says graphics, so let's take a look at what's on this one.

I would say City Graphix was a huge market failure because, like I said, the vast majority of people I've talked to didn't even know it. This was something that millions of people owned these records without even realizing that there was more to them than just the audio. If you really want to see some of these, there is a YouTube channel called CDG Museum and I don't know how. I've managed to upload these songs without copyright warnings, but you can see many of them there and I'll put a link in the description. Now let's talk about another type of CD.

This is a photo CD. What I have here is just a demo CD and it's on a factory printed CD that was actually included with this standalone photo CD player. Now I used to have a bunch of photo CDs but I threw them all away a long time ago after copying them to my home server, but for those who don't remember this, this is how it worked during the 1990s, you were probably using a camera of film and when you were done with your roll of film you would go to Kmart or your local drugstore or wherever they did film development and you.

You would find a stack of envelopes similar to this and then you would fill out all the personal information here and then you would mark what type of prints you would like to make and then one of the options you could choose was a Kodak photo CD. Well, this one actually says Photo CD, which is a slightly different format that came later, but I couldn't find one of these that said Photo CD because it would have to have been from the 1990s, but you get the idea, so that you put your film here and leave it and a few days later you come back and check your film and they give you the negatives back along with a CD of photos.

Now the photo CD would look a little different than it normally would. on a gold recordable CD and it looked more like this, but this is all I have for the moment, so let's put this example photo CD in here and see how it works. Now you might think that a photo CD is just a bunch of stored JPEG images. on a CD, but it was actually a proprietary format with uncompressed images. In fact, not even a computer could view these photos without using specially designed software, but with the CDI you could view these images quickly and easily on your living room television.

Also note that only standard definition television existed back then, however these photos still look pretty good. Now let's look at another type of CD, the video CD. Believe it or not, this was the predecessor to DVD video. In fact, most DVD players supported video. However, CD and DVD use a different type of physical media that actually contains more information and are double-sided videos. On the other hand, CDs use the same physical type of media as a music CD and are therefore limited to approximately 700 megabytes of data. So how do they squeeze a video stream into this?

Well, they used MPEG 1 compression. In 1990, computers weren't fast enough to decode a hit stream like this using purely software, so if you look at the back of the CDI player, you'll see a cartridge slot back here, Now what we have inside is an additional cartridge containing custom hardware to decode MPEG 1 video streams on the fly. It was actually not originally included with the CDI player as it added quite a few extra features. In fact, the cost of the cartridge could be several hundred dollars, so these are some video CDs from the era and many of them are very well known movies and I'll take out the Terminator 2 disc here unless it looks like normal , I can't. really show more than a few seconds of this or I'll end up with a copyright violation.

Of course one problem with this format is that it could only store about an hour on a single disc, so for a 2 hour movie the solution was to simply have 2 discs, people who used laser discs were already used to this anyway, so it probably wasn't a big deal, so the advertising for these video CDs said they were VHS quality, so I thought I should put that to the test and for that test I'm going to check out Forrest Gump and that's because I have this movie on video CD and VHS, by the way, Forrest Gump actually has three discs, the third one is actually a documentary called Through the Eyes of Forrest Gump and you know what it is.

In fact, very good, in fact, I understand that this version is longer and has more things than the version that comes on the DVD as a special feature and I think that is because it has the original version on laserdisc, which is 37 minutes, but they shortened it to 30 minutes for the TV broadcast and that's the version included on DVD anyway, so let's put this in the player and see what we get. I mean, here on the TV it looks pretty good, but I need a better way to compare it to VHS. What I'm going to do is directly connect the VCR to my video capture device and take some images, sorry, they're shown in black and white here.

I had the chroma turned all the way down for some strange reason, but don't worry, I fixed it and captured it again. Anyway, I can't show you manyfull screenshots or I will receive a copyright strike. I know I'm starting to sound like a broken record but it is what it is so anyway I captured some footage from VHS and now it's time to capture the same footage from BCD and this is where we run into a bit of a conundrum. I used s-video from the CDI player since it offers it and I think it's fair to do so because VHS was not capable of s-video. by its very nature, but some people might ask why I didn't just rip the contents directly from the video CD using a CD-ROM drive on a computer, which I could have done, but I felt like this was meant to play on your TV This was probably the fairest way to compare so I have some clips side by side here and at first glance they look pretty similar apart from some difference in color balance so what I'll do is show you some images stills that I captured of both. so here's the video CD and now VHS, let's try again in a different frame here's the video CD and now VHS, now let's zoom in on a specific area and see if we can see a little more detail, so I hate to say it, but I think VHS actually looks better and just for fun, here is a 720p version of the same thing, but on the right side, video CDs can be played thousands of times without any degradation unlike VHS and also you don't need rewind them, so we've taken a look at some of the formats that the CDI player was designed for, but none of those formats, at least up to this point, have been proprietary, meaning that music CD, photo CD , video CDs, all of these things can be played on other dedicated players, but of course the CDI player had its own executable code that could be used for encyclopedias or video games.

The CDI player is not known. Because of its large library of games, Phillips believes that the FMV or full motion video cartridge was the gaming CDI player's greatest asset and this allowed it to play games like Dragon's Lair, but in my opinion, I think the FMB cartridge was a obstacle that I will use. Dragon's Lair as an example. I remember the first time I saw this game in the arcade and everyone was gathered around the arcade watching it being played and the graphics looked absolutely amazing at the time but that's because I didn't realize that the game It was just a bunch of pre-recorded scenes, unless you weren't really controlling the character, but controlling what scene comes next with careful timing and watching the game was fun, but once I played it I was quite disappointed and many of the titles for CDI were designed at least.

Partially around this premise, games like Mad Dog McCree added mysteries to solve with some action. Mad Dog McCree and his gang of assassins, but they weren't as interactive as they seemed on the surface and here's another one, a Phantom Express, now this one. It's just a pre-recorded roller coaster scene, the only thing you control are little crosshairs to try to shoot at it and here's a kids game called Busiest Neighborhood Ever. It's just a bunch of FMV seeds put together with triggers in certain areas if you want. To find something special, move the star until it flashes, then press an action button and something fun will happen, but it allows the child to explore the neighborhood.

I think some of the best games on the system were games that didn't require the Tetris FMV cartridge is a great example. I now play Tetris on many platforms and I admit that the original NES version is probably my favorite from a gameplay standpoint, but I think the CDI version is easily my second favorite and I think you'll see why. them, each level of the game has a unique moving background in addition to a unique soundtrack here is another level and here is the next one quite interesting, uh, here is another one of my favorite games.

I've also played lemmings on several different platforms, but this one is really unique. for some reasons, the only thing is that it has a really long intro, five minutes long, however the FMV cartridge is not really necessary to play as the game itself looks very similar to most the other 16-bit consoles and computers. At the time, I think the closest resemblance is to the Super Nintendo version, but I think the music is just a giant sample played from the CD. In the end I saw the AVG video about the CDI and I don't know, I never believed it.

It could be that bad and it really isn't. There are some really good titles on CDI. Some of my favorite games on the CDI are Thunder in Paradise. I know it sounds strange. A great FMV game. Everything begins. Kogan is just super helpful. It's based on his TV show he did in the 90's and it has a lot of variety especially for being just a shooter it's on Rails but it changes constantly every game where it stops the order of the enemies it has multiple endings that I've been to dozens of times at this point and I keep finding new FMV scenes.

I was very lucky to get Link Zelda or both old ones as Link were terrible games. There is a great beat em up also called Mutant Rampage Bodyslam. I really recommend it. that there is a mix of games for them, so this was their adult game called Boyer, which is exactly what Hotel Mario sounds like, it gets a lot of criticism but it's actually a really good puzzle platformer, the cutscenes aren't as great, no. There's a lot to write home about but it's actually a pretty good game, it also has chaos control which I think even had a PS1 release, really good ports of Myst 7th Guest of course, Byrne Cycle which was kind of a great app for the CDI, it's not all sunshine and Rainbows, the CDI of course the golf games were pretty good, they are all very live action like, it almost reminds you of Dragon's Lair or previous PC games.

There are some things that even I, a CDI fan, don't like. They are the controls that ship with their wireless controllers but with infrared, so naturally you lose that line of sight to your CDI and you're not going to play your game. Basically I ended up buying the Genesis style 3 button gamepad, it works pretty well. it's not the best gamepad in the world it's not the best d-pad in the world but it works very, very well for CDI games, all the software, whether it's a game encyclopedia, whatever software you're using for the CDI, they all had to do it. be made to be able to use any of the input devices, so even its similar weapon you can use to play a platform game.

I don't recommend it, but you can do it if that's how you live your life. Another really cool thing about the Light Gun is that it will work on a modern TV, you don't have to use a CRT, so it's a bit progressive. I guess it's partly because of the AVGN videos about this, people don't take it seriously and it was never meant to be that way. a gaming platform, at least not initially, so to me it's pretty impressive what they were able to do. The goal of the system was to accommodate most of the entertainment in your home, so they wanted it to be your VCR and your game. system and their education system no longer allowed him to have a computer and like they were just trying to replace all of that, so it's supposed to be multifaceted.

Somehow they managed to make it so that, to some extent, there are some hidden gems on the CDI, but like any other console, it also has a lot of bad games and you have to look a little deeper to find those hidden gems, so one thing The one that is talked about a lot is that Philips managed to secure the rights from Nintendo to use some of its games. characters for games like in this Zelda port, but they were outsourced to another company and the games ended up being almost universally hated and in fact sometimes these games are used to judge the entire CDI franchise, which I think is a little unfair .

There are many different versions of CDI players, like this top loader which came a few years later and it's surprising how small it is, it's supposed to open itself but I just need a little help putting a CD in, just sit down. it's here and there are no clips or anything and then you just close the top on the front you get a controller port on the side there's an on/off switch and on the back this just has the standard low end options for audio and video, one strange thing is that the power brick uses an rj45 connection.

At first glance, some people today might think it is an Ethernet port, but it is not. The model also has a slot for the FMV cartridge, you just have to press here and this cover appears. off, you may notice this badge on the top that comes with the cartridge so it can externally show that your model is equipped with it, but the cartridge itself is essentially the same as the previous unit, the smaller top loader had a much lower price and was designed specifically to compete with the Commodore CD 32, neither of which made a big splash in the gaming market.

It wasn't until the Sony Playstation arrived in 1994 that the compact disc would have a major impact on gaming. Later, they came out with this one. More compact front loading unit. I think it was mainly sold to schools and similar companies and things like that. It seemed to have an FM V cartridge essentially built in, although one strange thing I noticed is that I don't think it plays CD Plus for Aphex. The CDI player was the first of its kind and Philips didn't really know what to do with it at the time and I think they would have bundled it with a better controller and maybe focused on a different genre of gaming instead of full motion video . games type I think it would have been more successful as a games console, however it paved the way for other consoles, including the DVD video, which was still largely based on the video CD design.

I hope you enjoyed this look back at Philips. CDI and as always stay until the next episode and thanks for watching.