Hi,

I'm about to buy me a CD-i 180/181 with remote, mouse, cd caddy and everything that should be with it.
But my question: can you make CD-i titles with this player or do you need another development machine?

What should a CD-i 180/181 cost these days?

I already own a 604, I thought I could make titles with it but I can't (too bad...) is this the right one or should I keep looking for another machine?

Don't you also need the 182 part? I'm not sure...

If you have an emulator, the 18x set should have an EBU connection for it. Do you have one?

Personally I'd prefer a 605 for title development, it's more compact and has more testing/debugging support. There's one on ebay right now (search for "CD-i player")...

I already own a 604 with DV cartridge but can't do anything with it, so what's better about the 605?

Does the 604 have the EBU connection for a CD-i emulator? It's three 'tulip' connectors and a pushbutton 'intern/extern'.

Also the 605 has a "Tools" button in the upper right where you can select the amount of RAM/ROM; setting RAM to 0.0 gives you a base-case test environment.

There's also two "real" serial ports (DB9), but I think these are common for the entire 60x series. And if you have an extension board (should be in about every 605), you have Ethernet (BNC only), a printer port and a SCSI port as well.

The emulator is required for really serious development, but you might be able to get by with using a hard disk and burning CD-R's; I believe that's what cdoty is doing anyway.

http://www.xms.nl/DSC00229.JPG

picture of the rear end, but the 604 is another topic

but what would be the price of a 180 now?  

--Last edited by djkoelkast on 2005-06-06 01:36:48 --

 The price of a 180 is about 20-25 EUR. But you'll need to have the third module to do any development. So far I've only seen one of these modules ever and it wasn't for sale. So better go for that 605. Yes, the one on eBay is mine .

 I'm also wondering if one can connect an external cd-rom player to the scsi bus and run titles from there (the internal cd drive is giving problems). Might give it a try later this week...

You could connect it, but the problem is getting the player to recognize the drive. You would need a CDFM driver over SCSI and that is not a trivial piece of software.

For CD-i, it has to handle both non-realtime and realtime reading of disc sectors and also playing audio (both ADPCM and CDDA). In theory you could forward the ADPCM stuff to the "original" driver but...

And realtime reading is complex, it involves dispatching sectors to various targets according to the channel mask and play control list.  

--Last edited by cdidev on 2005-06-06 11:59:32 --

hmm never seen a 180 so cheap...
Some pictures of what I'll get:

www.ad-it.nl/cdi/1.jpg

www.ad-it.nl/cdi/2.jpg

www.ad-it.nl/cdi/3.jpg

 I've sold several at around that price. Somehow they seem to turn up quite a lot around here, usually with some nice extras. I think I must have had 4 or 5, and also passed a few with no interesting extra stuff. However I only saw one 220V version (I still have that one), the rest was 110V. The one currently on offer on marktplaats (location Susteren/Eindhoven) was mine, I recognize if from the voltage converter .

for how much did you sell that one?

 I don't know for how much I sold this one. Could be that I traded it for something or that it was sold via eBay/marktplaats, it was some time ago and I only remember that voltage converter. There should one or mroe caddies with it; I should have some extra if you  need those.

 OK, I've managed to hook up the CD-i module of the CDI180 (with the cd-drive) to my CDI605T with defective CD-drive and it works perfectly. It's now running a CD-i title via the emulator-port.

I also do have one of those CDD5?? 1-speed cd-writers which supposedly where supported by OS-9/CD-i. So that would also work? I'll see if I still have the right scsi cables for hooking it up...

That would be a CDD521 then? Some emulator models had a second SCSI port to connect this to (E1 and some E2 models, I think).

This burner wasn't supposed to be directly connected to the CD-i player, although it should in principle be possible if you have OS-9 cd-burning software supporting it...

CDD522 it says. I must admit I've never tried this. The writer has also been gathering dust here .

The 522 was an updated version of the 521, but I don't remember the exact differences (SPC had one of each). I haven't got one anymore, anyway. They used to be hideously expensive (NLG 10K or something?). I do have two emulators capable of supporting this burner, though .  

--Last edited by cdidev on 2005-06-06 17:54:28 --

 Yes, expensive is the keyword here . There is 32MB cache in my cd-writer, consisting of 2 16Mb 30-pins simms. That would be around 3k at the time...

To make it short: I can't make any CD-i titles with a 180/181?

From Emulator and Emulation, Philips IMS TSA Technica Note number 6:

• The CDI 180/181 player is the original CDI player and can be connected to the optional 182 expansion module which contains 1 MB of expansion (system) memory, SCSI controller, serial port, parallel port, optional thin-wire ethernet interface and two floppy disk drives.
  

• The Philips CDI 605 player, which is very similar to the consumer players (CDI 910 and CDI 205) contains a floppy disk drive, two serial ports, 4 MB of expansion memory, SCSI controller, parallel port and a thinwire ethernet interface.
  

In short: you can develop without the 182, but it's not very easy; I think the basic 180/181 unit does not even have a serial port! The 605 is really a better platform, even without the extension board.

OTOH, you can develop CD-i titles on any player if you burn CD-R's and use the ROM download protocol to download executables over the serial port (the CD-i Link program from cdifan can be used to do this). We used to do this at SPC to debug problems occurring only on particular player models.

 The nicest thing with the CDI605 (and of course the 180 if you have the expansion module) is that you can just download files from a normal PC/workstation via ethernet and run them from an attached disc. The best to have is of course the I2M card, with this you can run the programs from your windows diskdrive and use the cd-rom drive from your PC to play CD-i titles.

But I can't do anything with my 604? It does have a ethernet connection (UTP!)