8 ms·

I was one of the lead developers at Philips Interactive Media. To be fair, where the article focuses on video games, the CD-I player was never intended to be a

I was one of the lead developers at Philips Interactive Media. To be fair, where the article focuses on video games, the CD-I player was never intended to be a game machine. At the time, Philips was betting that encyclopedias, educational and subscription publications would be on discs. They were betting that the network speed and general public adoption of the Internet was going to be slower, with a disc based interactive media period. They underestimated the advance of network speeds as well as the public's willingness to wait for the network. A lot of the CD-I development was centered around the consumer / end-user never having to wait, which was accomplished through a special real time media file format that effectively turned the disc into a single 740 MB file. It was not until the reality of CD-I players being sold that the necessity for games and the zero interest in educational media became clear. At the time, digital media itself was new, and the idea of a dedicated digital disc based encyclopedia / magazine made sense.

niftich 8y ago
In many ways, the focus on educational markets and rich magazine content made sense: presumably the revenue model would be based on licensing per volume, and a subscription publication guarantees an ongoing flow of new copies to be sold. This was also an established industry as opposed to video gaming, which was either nascent and amateur, or tightly controlled by established players making arcade cabinets and home consoles. Was there a sense that you're abusing the spirit of the CD with the Green Book (the CD-i spec)?
- bsenftner 8y ago
  The Green Book was just another standard, dictating the tolerances a CD player had to operate within in order to certify as being CD-I player capable. Where the Red Book dictated how data on disc in sectors had to be organized and played back, the Green Book did the same for interleaved files and real time media. There was no concept of "abuse", just different standards for different purposes. Any CD-I player was a CD-ROM player, but only Green Book complaint hardware could be called a CD-I player.
- bsenftner 8y ago
  I also remember the day Microsoft made Internet Explorer free - it was the first time a major piece of software was simply "free" - speculation among CD & subscription based media proponents was that was Bill Gates trying to kill CD based business models.
aresant 8y ago
That is a really fascinating comment - essentially the advent of gaming on the platform was a reposition after the market it was built for failed. I'd love to hear more about how Philips managed to get Nintendo over a barrel on use of their characters though - Nintendo is one of the tightest creative IP holders in the world at this point, maybe their experience with Philips pushed them towards that?
- bsenftner 8y ago
  Back then the big consumer players were Nintendo, Sony and Philips. The PlayStation was actually the second PlayStation, with a deal between Philips and Sony to jointly produce it blown by Nintendo. The result of which being Philips able to use Nintendo licenses in limited ways, and Sony hating Philips.
- BigChiefSmokem 8y ago
  I'm 100% sure Nintendo became Disney-esque right after the Super Mario Bros movie came out. They were completely embarrassed publicly for that. Before that they were just greedy cartridge licensers.
rconti 8y ago
This takes me back, and points out something people today probably don't fully appreciate. In 1993, Edutainment was the promise of computers. We had an old XT that my sister took to college that fall, and we were shopping for a 486. Encarta and National Geographic CD-ROM based titles were everywhere. Every demo in every computer store let you play with these seemingly-limitless repositories of information. It was mind-blowing -- complete with short postage stamp videos for select subjects! It would be fascinating to look back at all of the titles available, but rich multimedia was finally here, and it died as quickly as it had arrived, as people moved to AOL, CompuServe, and the Internet instead.
- cpitman 8y ago
  I sunk a ton of time into Encarta as a kid. In some ways, it still seems superior to Wikipedia.
  - ElCapitanMarkla 8y ago
    I remember replaying that cheetah video, Neil Armstrong’s “one small step...” and that gravity interactive countless times
    - asd 8y ago
      I think these may be the two videos you are referring to. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEH-HxLJtBM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEH-HxLJtBM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4t2g37DAcQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4t2g37DAcQ
    - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
      Basketball too :)
  - chrisfinazzo 8y ago
    Mindmaze. That's all I have to say.
    - 8y ago
ericras 8y ago
The CD-I (along with WebTV and some other things) was the initial step of the TV morphing into some sort of Information Superhighway appliance. MSNBC was a partnership of Microsoft and NBC that was created in anticipation of this as well. But the TV/PC hybrid never happened. (Today's Apple TV, XBox, etc really aren't what people had in mind.)
- BonesJustice 8y ago
  TiVo was really the first product that came close to fulfilling the dream of “asynchronous TV”, which is now fully realized thanks to streaming. Anyone else remember reading that chapter in Bill Gates’ book “The Road Ahead” back in the ‘90s?
- niftich 8y ago
  It sort of happened, just 20 years later, and the details are different. The web's user experience proved to be superior to that of physical media you had to switch out, but Internet speeds had to get fast enough (and the usage billed in a lenient way) for rich multimedia to be delivered smoothly. In the meantime, the TV screen lost relevance to first desktop computers, then laptop computers, then smartphones. Microsoft was the only large company who consistently hammered on this idea (Encarta, DHTML, MSN, HD-DVD's HDi, Xbox 360's dashboard), and with a vested interest in the health of the desktop ecosystem, but they couldn't execute this first convergence -- and ironically, neither the second convergence of desktops and smartphones. Apple and Google leapfrogged them in critical ways, and this interactive consumption revolution took place on the latter two's portable smartphones instead.
  - ericras 8y ago
    It definitely happened, but in a much different way: mostly over the internet/www and on computers and phones. The vision in the early-mid 90s was for something like MSNBC to be an interactive TV channel, delivered by the TV/cable provider, where you could chat/vote/etc through the TV and customize your experience. That sounds similar to what we have now (with their cable channel, accompanying website, app, Twitter, etc) but the technical details and delivery mechanisms ended up being totally different.
BonesJustice 8y ago
My dad was a marketing exec at Philips back in the ‘90s, so I had a couple of CD-I units at home, and a ton of games. I even had an infrared gun controller and a really, really low-quality VR headset driven by dark little CRTs (I think?). Most of my discs had simple white labels, and I’m pretty sure many of them were never actually released. I wish I still had them. At the time, my dad had told me the CD-I’s primary market was commercial, e.g., interactive training, demo kiosks, media stations in libraries, etc. I don’t know whether that was the original vision or a pivot based on lousy sales. It was probably a smart move, though, considering the only other person I knew with a CD-I at home was the daughter of the VP overseeing that division. I used to have a CD-I infomercial on VHS featuring a giant, talking screen called “The Wall”. I wonder if I can track that down on the interwebs. Fun aside: a CD-I video disc of Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan was my first exposure to Trek. Other fond memories include The Wacky World of Miniature Golf (sooo much fun), Escape from Cyber City, Mad Dog McCree, and Laser Lords (never did make much progress in that game).
- bsenftner 8y ago
  After the consumer market failed, it was re-purposed for the industrial media / trainer market. The production system I wrote for Philips to make slide show media was licensed to 3rd party developers, and I remember answering different developer's questions about the development for at least a decade after I left Philips. (I left Philips to be an OS developer for the 3DO, and left them to be an OS developer for the PlayStation. Ah, those were the daze.)
  - w0utert 8y ago
    >> I left Philips to be an OS developer for the 3DO, and left them to be an OS developer for the PlayStation. Ah, those were the daze Third time’s a charm ;-P
  - roryisok 8y ago
    As a kid I desperately wanted a CDi, and then an Amiga CD32 and then a 3DO. I never got any of them. Having saved enough to finally buy a 3DO I was derailed at the last minute by my dad who didn't want me spending so much on a games machine. He made a deal that if I didn't buy it he'd splash out for a new PC. That was the PC I learned to code on and the decision that led me to this career, and I'm glad he talked me out of it. It's so strange to be sharing a chat forum decades later with one of the engineers who built the OS for it. I'm sorry I never got to admire your handiwork, but I'm also not sorry :)
trebligdivad 8y ago
I had a summer job at 3T productions in ~1992, who did Cluedo for CD-i; while I spent my time on a CD-XA project on a PC, dev for the CD-i wasn't easy; given video compression was so early, and the video-decompressor module was optional, it was difficult to do any useful video on CD-i, and the specified seek time on the CD was ages. Remember that doing CD dev for anything in 1992 was hard - CD writers were >£10k (and blanks ~£10+ each) with the CD writer connected via phono to a CD-i dev machine wired onto a Sun workstation. And that 600MB+ hard drive you needed to store the image was full-height 5.25" (and I hate to think the cost).
- bsenftner 8y ago
  Those old Sun workstations had re-purposed grey-scale newspaper publishing screens. I remember being hooked on having two full newspaper page sized windows side by side for my CD-I development. Not until retina displays did I have that again, and it was very welcome.
chrisfinazzo 8y ago
So you're the one... It was such a short period of time, but holy shit was it good. As (I believe) Merlin Mann said on the first episode of Reconcilable Differences, "...and then there's those poor bastards in Tallahassee with all the Phillips CD-i stuff that was popular for a month" Pour one out for CD-i. Ahead of its time.
- smacktoward 8y ago
  > Pour one out for CD-i. Ahead of its time. As someone whose first job in tech was doing software QA for a publisher of CD-i titles, let me say: no, it really wasn't. If anything, CD-i was behind its time. As a game console, its poor controls and sluggish responsiveness made it inferior even to consoles like the Genesis and SNES that had come out years earlier; as a means of playing back video, its reliance on a low-resolution SDTV display made it inferior even to a computer with a VGA monitor; as a repository of information, its dependence on optical media made it inferior even to a nascent Web accessed over a 28.8kpbs modem. Even at first release, there was nothing CD-i did that some other product already on the market wasn't doing better. This wasn't because the engineers at Philips were bad at their jobs; as the parent comment notes, it's more to do with CD-i being a product designed for a market segment that turned out to not really exist. So it ended up getting sold into market segments that did exist, against products that had been designed specifically to satisfy the needs of those segments. And of course those products ran rings around it there.
  - chrisfinazzo 8y ago
    That comment was more for @bsenftner, tbh. They tried, but it didn't work out. No need to rub salt in the wound just because the format didn't catch on. Oh, and for the record...SNES > Genesis.
    - mjevans 8y ago
      While they are considered to be part of the same 'generation' ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_console#Fourth_generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_console#Fourth_gene... ) the Genesis was released two years before the NES, which at that time was around 1/3rd to 1/2 of a console generation. IMO, where Sega really failed was all of the failed addons. They didn't really have a 'good' console until the Dreamcast, it had many features that were too far ahead of their time, while being crippled by others which were detrimental. Largely using an outdated 'mega CD' like format and lacking support for DVD playback, which the competitor (PS2) ended up having as a major selling point. In some parallel universe where the Dreamcast happened to have DVD playback (as well as games on either CD or DVD depending) and the option of an ethernet or modem addin Sega might still be making consoles.
bitwize 8y ago
Holy shit, yes. "Multimedia" was to the early 90s what "blockchain" is to today. Even Tandy tried to get in on this act, releasing a CD-ROM "interactive video player" that was actually a 286-based PC running a customized Windows.
- danmg 8y ago
  Pretty on the nose. Devices that were little more than slide show players like the Kodak Photo CD player were considered "multimedia." Come to think of it, doesn't Kodak have a "blockchain" technology they demoed recently? also, hello n-g.
  - bitwize 8y ago
    Who is n-g?
    - danmg 8y ago
      That would violate the Prime Directive.
      - bitwize 8y ago
        I'm not affiliated with them.
        danmg 8y ago
        kk
joncrane 8y ago
Was this basically the Enterprise Version of "el paquete?" (The Cuban sneakernet)
octetta 8y ago
I developed one title for CDi while working at a media/marketing company in the early 90's. We had goals of putting the CDi machine in a kiosk with a touch-screen so customers could learn about products without a salesperson hassling them. I carried my "Green Book" around for many years afterwards but never did further CDi development.
monkeyprojects 8y ago
At the time Philips started working on CD-I the internet hardly existed in Europe. When I was working on the UK titles back in 1990-2 the Internet really wasn't on people's radar. Only as 1992 turned into 1993 did anyone think the AOL's and Compuserve's as this world would get anywhere. Equally you miss out the biggest issue with most developments with CD-I the available disk speed and memory (even ignoring seek times) made most developments an interest combination of careful design and often luck. Watching that Mario interstitial with moving eyebrows I'm imaging the disk spinning desperately trying to load the next scene into memory. As an example I remember spending a week trying to work out how to minimise a MPEG video (quarter screen max) in such a way that we could run a seek and load up the background image ready for the next scene.
flyinghamster 8y ago
I have a first-edition copy of "Compact Disc-Interactive: A Designer's Overview" as a result of a job interview in 1988 that didn't pan out. Looking through it now, one interesting tidbit is that the embedded "CD-RTOS" operating system was based on OS-9 for the 68000. They also wanted to introduce a new buzzword: "hyper-media" (the hyphen is theirs, not mine). Choice quote: "The concept of hyper-media could have been invented to describe CD-I. Its origins lie in the notion of hyper-text, a term coined by computer guru Ted Nelson in 1965 as a method of linking related bodies of information to allow the user to browse through different databases randomly."
Garvey 8y ago
Don't suppose you happen to have any old documentation lying around? Long shot I know but... nostalgia github.com/mamedev/mame/issues/3599#issuecomment-391492737

niftich 8y ago

In many ways, the focus on educational markets and rich magazine content made sense: presumably the revenue model would be based on licensing per volume, and a subscription publication guarantees an ongoing flow of new copies to be sold. This was also an established industry as opposed to video gaming, which was either nascent and amateur, or tightly controlled by established players making arcade cabinets and home consoles. Was there a sense that you're abusing the spirit of the CD with the Green Book (the CD-i spec)?

bsenftner 8y ago
The Green Book was just another standard, dictating the tolerances a CD player had to operate within in order to certify as being CD-I player capable. Where the Red Book dictated how data on disc in sectors had to be organized and played back, the Green Book did the same for interleaved files and real time media. There was no concept of "abuse", just different standards for different purposes. Any CD-I player was a CD-ROM player, but only Green Book complaint hardware could be called a CD-I player.
bsenftner 8y ago
I also remember the day Microsoft made Internet Explorer free - it was the first time a major piece of software was simply "free" - speculation among CD & subscription based media proponents was that was Bill Gates trying to kill CD based business models.

aresant 8y ago

That is a really fascinating comment - essentially the advent of gaming on the platform was a reposition after the market it was built for failed. I'd love to hear more about how Philips managed to get Nintendo over a barrel on use of their characters though - Nintendo is one of the tightest creative IP holders in the world at this point, maybe their experience with Philips pushed them towards that?

bsenftner 8y ago
Back then the big consumer players were Nintendo, Sony and Philips. The PlayStation was actually the second PlayStation, with a deal between Philips and Sony to jointly produce it blown by Nintendo. The result of which being Philips able to use Nintendo licenses in limited ways, and Sony hating Philips.
BigChiefSmokem 8y ago
I'm 100% sure Nintendo became Disney-esque right after the Super Mario Bros movie came out. They were completely embarrassed publicly for that. Before that they were just greedy cartridge licensers.

rconti 8y ago

This takes me back, and points out something people today probably don't fully appreciate. In 1993, Edutainment was the promise of computers. We had an old XT that my sister took to college that fall, and we were shopping for a 486. Encarta and National Geographic CD-ROM based titles were everywhere. Every demo in every computer store let you play with these seemingly-limitless repositories of information. It was mind-blowing -- complete with short postage stamp videos for select subjects! It would be fascinating to look back at all of the titles available, but rich multimedia was finally here, and it died as quickly as it had arrived, as people moved to AOL, CompuServe, and the Internet instead.

cpitman 8y ago
I sunk a ton of time into Encarta as a kid. In some ways, it still seems superior to Wikipedia.
- ElCapitanMarkla 8y ago
  I remember replaying that cheetah video, Neil Armstrong’s “one small step...” and that gravity interactive countless times
  - asd 8y ago
    I think these may be the two videos you are referring to. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEH-HxLJtBM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEH-HxLJtBM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4t2g37DAcQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4t2g37DAcQ
  - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    Basketball too :)
- chrisfinazzo 8y ago
  Mindmaze. That's all I have to say.
  - 8y ago

ericras 8y ago

The CD-I (along with WebTV and some other things) was the initial step of the TV morphing into some sort of Information Superhighway appliance. MSNBC was a partnership of Microsoft and NBC that was created in anticipation of this as well. But the TV/PC hybrid never happened. (Today's Apple TV, XBox, etc really aren't what people had in mind.)

BonesJustice 8y ago
TiVo was really the first product that came close to fulfilling the dream of “asynchronous TV”, which is now fully realized thanks to streaming. Anyone else remember reading that chapter in Bill Gates’ book “The Road Ahead” back in the ‘90s?
niftich 8y ago
It sort of happened, just 20 years later, and the details are different. The web's user experience proved to be superior to that of physical media you had to switch out, but Internet speeds had to get fast enough (and the usage billed in a lenient way) for rich multimedia to be delivered smoothly. In the meantime, the TV screen lost relevance to first desktop computers, then laptop computers, then smartphones. Microsoft was the only large company who consistently hammered on this idea (Encarta, DHTML, MSN, HD-DVD's HDi, Xbox 360's dashboard), and with a vested interest in the health of the desktop ecosystem, but they couldn't execute this first convergence -- and ironically, neither the second convergence of desktops and smartphones. Apple and Google leapfrogged them in critical ways, and this interactive consumption revolution took place on the latter two's portable smartphones instead.
- ericras 8y ago
  It definitely happened, but in a much different way: mostly over the internet/www and on computers and phones. The vision in the early-mid 90s was for something like MSNBC to be an interactive TV channel, delivered by the TV/cable provider, where you could chat/vote/etc through the TV and customize your experience. That sounds similar to what we have now (with their cable channel, accompanying website, app, Twitter, etc) but the technical details and delivery mechanisms ended up being totally different.

BonesJustice 8y ago

My dad was a marketing exec at Philips back in the ‘90s, so I had a couple of CD-I units at home, and a ton of games. I even had an infrared gun controller and a really, really low-quality VR headset driven by dark little CRTs (I think?). Most of my discs had simple white labels, and I’m pretty sure many of them were never actually released. I wish I still had them. At the time, my dad had told me the CD-I’s primary market was commercial, e.g., interactive training, demo kiosks, media stations in libraries, etc. I don’t know whether that was the original vision or a pivot based on lousy sales. It was probably a smart move, though, considering the only other person I knew with a CD-I at home was the daughter of the VP overseeing that division. I used to have a CD-I infomercial on VHS featuring a giant, talking screen called “The Wall”. I wonder if I can track that down on the interwebs. Fun aside: a CD-I video disc of Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan was my first exposure to Trek. Other fond memories include The Wacky World of Miniature Golf (sooo much fun), Escape from Cyber City, Mad Dog McCree, and Laser Lords (never did make much progress in that game).

bsenftner 8y ago
After the consumer market failed, it was re-purposed for the industrial media / trainer market. The production system I wrote for Philips to make slide show media was licensed to 3rd party developers, and I remember answering different developer's questions about the development for at least a decade after I left Philips. (I left Philips to be an OS developer for the 3DO, and left them to be an OS developer for the PlayStation. Ah, those were the daze.)
- w0utert 8y ago
  >> I left Philips to be an OS developer for the 3DO, and left them to be an OS developer for the PlayStation. Ah, those were the daze Third time’s a charm ;-P
- roryisok 8y ago
  As a kid I desperately wanted a CDi, and then an Amiga CD32 and then a 3DO. I never got any of them. Having saved enough to finally buy a 3DO I was derailed at the last minute by my dad who didn't want me spending so much on a games machine. He made a deal that if I didn't buy it he'd splash out for a new PC. That was the PC I learned to code on and the decision that led me to this career, and I'm glad he talked me out of it. It's so strange to be sharing a chat forum decades later with one of the engineers who built the OS for it. I'm sorry I never got to admire your handiwork, but I'm also not sorry :)

trebligdivad 8y ago

I had a summer job at 3T productions in ~1992, who did Cluedo for CD-i; while I spent my time on a CD-XA project on a PC, dev for the CD-i wasn't easy; given video compression was so early, and the video-decompressor module was optional, it was difficult to do any useful video on CD-i, and the specified seek time on the CD was ages. Remember that doing CD dev for anything in 1992 was hard - CD writers were >£10k (and blanks ~£10+ each) with the CD writer connected via phono to a CD-i dev machine wired onto a Sun workstation. And that 600MB+ hard drive you needed to store the image was full-height 5.25" (and I hate to think the cost).

bsenftner 8y ago
Those old Sun workstations had re-purposed grey-scale newspaper publishing screens. I remember being hooked on having two full newspaper page sized windows side by side for my CD-I development. Not until retina displays did I have that again, and it was very welcome.

chrisfinazzo 8y ago

So you're the one... It was such a short period of time, but holy shit was it good. As (I believe) Merlin Mann said on the first episode of Reconcilable Differences, "...and then there's those poor bastards in Tallahassee with all the Phillips CD-i stuff that was popular for a month" Pour one out for CD-i. Ahead of its time.

smacktoward 8y ago
> Pour one out for CD-i. Ahead of its time. As someone whose first job in tech was doing software QA for a publisher of CD-i titles, let me say: no, it really wasn't. If anything, CD-i was behind its time. As a game console, its poor controls and sluggish responsiveness made it inferior even to consoles like the Genesis and SNES that had come out years earlier; as a means of playing back video, its reliance on a low-resolution SDTV display made it inferior even to a computer with a VGA monitor; as a repository of information, its dependence on optical media made it inferior even to a nascent Web accessed over a 28.8kpbs modem. Even at first release, there was nothing CD-i did that some other product already on the market wasn't doing better. This wasn't because the engineers at Philips were bad at their jobs; as the parent comment notes, it's more to do with CD-i being a product designed for a market segment that turned out to not really exist. So it ended up getting sold into market segments that did exist, against products that had been designed specifically to satisfy the needs of those segments. And of course those products ran rings around it there.
- chrisfinazzo 8y ago
  That comment was more for @bsenftner, tbh. They tried, but it didn't work out. No need to rub salt in the wound just because the format didn't catch on. Oh, and for the record...SNES > Genesis.
  - mjevans 8y ago
    While they are considered to be part of the same 'generation' ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_console#Fourth_generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_console#Fourth_gene... ) the Genesis was released two years before the NES, which at that time was around 1/3rd to 1/2 of a console generation. IMO, where Sega really failed was all of the failed addons. They didn't really have a 'good' console until the Dreamcast, it had many features that were too far ahead of their time, while being crippled by others which were detrimental. Largely using an outdated 'mega CD' like format and lacking support for DVD playback, which the competitor (PS2) ended up having as a major selling point. In some parallel universe where the Dreamcast happened to have DVD playback (as well as games on either CD or DVD depending) and the option of an ethernet or modem addin Sega might still be making consoles.

bitwize 8y ago

Holy shit, yes. "Multimedia" was to the early 90s what "blockchain" is to today. Even Tandy tried to get in on this act, releasing a CD-ROM "interactive video player" that was actually a 286-based PC running a customized Windows.

danmg 8y ago
Pretty on the nose. Devices that were little more than slide show players like the Kodak Photo CD player were considered "multimedia." Come to think of it, doesn't Kodak have a "blockchain" technology they demoed recently? also, hello n-g.
- bitwize 8y ago
  Who is n-g?
  - danmg 8y ago
    That would violate the Prime Directive.
    - bitwize 8y ago
      I'm not affiliated with them.
      - danmg 8y ago
        kk

joncrane 8y ago

Was this basically the Enterprise Version of "el paquete?" (The Cuban sneakernet)

octetta 8y ago

I developed one title for CDi while working at a media/marketing company in the early 90's. We had goals of putting the CDi machine in a kiosk with a touch-screen so customers could learn about products without a salesperson hassling them. I carried my "Green Book" around for many years afterwards but never did further CDi development.

monkeyprojects 8y ago

At the time Philips started working on CD-I the internet hardly existed in Europe. When I was working on the UK titles back in 1990-2 the Internet really wasn't on people's radar. Only as 1992 turned into 1993 did anyone think the AOL's and Compuserve's as this world would get anywhere. Equally you miss out the biggest issue with most developments with CD-I the available disk speed and memory (even ignoring seek times) made most developments an interest combination of careful design and often luck. Watching that Mario interstitial with moving eyebrows I'm imaging the disk spinning desperately trying to load the next scene into memory. As an example I remember spending a week trying to work out how to minimise a MPEG video (quarter screen max) in such a way that we could run a seek and load up the background image ready for the next scene.

flyinghamster 8y ago

I have a first-edition copy of "Compact Disc-Interactive: A Designer's Overview" as a result of a job interview in 1988 that didn't pan out. Looking through it now, one interesting tidbit is that the embedded "CD-RTOS" operating system was based on OS-9 for the 68000. They also wanted to introduce a new buzzword: "hyper-media" (the hyphen is theirs, not mine). Choice quote: "The concept of hyper-media could have been invented to describe CD-I. Its origins lie in the notion of hyper-text, a term coined by computer guru Ted Nelson in 1965 as a method of linking related bodies of information to allow the user to browse through different databases randomly."

Garvey 8y ago

Don't suppose you happen to have any old documentation lying around? Long shot I know but... nostalgia github.com/mamedev/mame/issues/3599#issuecomment-391492737