Anyone have a Philips CD-i?

[Jamisonia]

anyone?

[flojocabron]

I dont own a system, but I do have a tennis game. Its somewhere in my house. They come in strange long cases. Gray, and about as thick as a Dvd case.

[Hatta]

I do. Oddly enough my GF's brother in law bought one back in the day when they cost like $700. Of course he regretted it, and didn't use it for years. So when they found out about my collection they gave it to me.

I think it's pretty nifty, but clearly it failed for good reasons. Playing with it kind of transports me back to 1991 when FMV was really impressive. Just the fact that there was moving video on a game system was enough to keep your interest. If you can't get your head back to that place, there's nothing the CD-I has to offer you.

The system itself is really pretty cool. It runs a version of Microwares OS9 real time OS. The RTOS is important, because the hardware doesn't buffer. It's a 1x CDROM that reads exactly as fast as it has to to display video. It looks pretty neat on the shelf too, like a quality piece of AV equipment.

Probably the game I've played most is Plunderball. It was an unreleased game that got finished up and released a few years ago. It's just pinball in space, with occasional (really corny) FMV cut scenes. Good for a laugh, and it works with just 2 buttons, which is nice because the joystick on the remote kind of sucks.

Still haven't tried the Zelda games yet. I'll get to it. Best thing about the system is the complete lack of copy protection.

[Zerodash]

I have one, though the CD Drive is failing. If anyone knows someone who can fix one of these damn things, let me know.

At this point, the only real use for the CDi is to showcase those shitty Mario and Zelda games. The only game I know of that has a decent reputation is Burn:Cycle (I think that's the name).

[Hatta]

Burn Cycle suffers from all the typical failings of early FMV games. You have to know exactly where to click at what time or you die, then you start over. It is pretty well produced though, the writing and acting aren't much worse than a typical cable network drama.

The one real game I'm aware of is The Apprentice. It's a platformer with really nice cartoon graphics, it would have been jaw dropping in 1992. I haven't put too much time on it, since I'm not a huge platformer fan, but it's worth mentioning.

A lot of the fun of the CD-I is not in gaming, but in exploring the weirdo multimedia software they thought would sell instead of games. You really have to have an MST3k attitude towards it.

[alienjesus]

I have one, though the CD Drive is failing. If anyone knows someone who can fix one of these damn things, let me know.

At this point, the only real use for the CDi is to showcase those shitty Mario and Zelda games. The only game I know of that has a decent reputation is Burn:Cycle (I think that's the name).

I did, but the disc draw and cd drive both broke, so now I just have a non-working CDi. I had Hotel Mario, a pacman puzzle game, pinball and caesers palace (a casino game).

[Hatta]

I guess I'm lucky to have one in working order then. You can find some repair tips here. There's also a more in depth repair guide on that site, but it's in french. :/

[Thierry Henry]

I've got the 'Magnavox' branded model of the CD-i.
This unit kinda looks more like a games console unlike the earlier bulky VCR looking models.

I've actually put in a fair bit of time lately with regard to some of the games.
The one game I quite enjoyed was Secret Mission. It's a puzzle game much like the style of point and click adventures. Good atmosphere and a nice looking game. It's one of the best games which doesn't need a Digital Video Cartridge to function.

[Jamisonia]

I just got one fairly cheap. Unfortunately the plastic cd tray cracked into 3 big pieces and a million little ones in shipment, one more reason I hate UPS.

Anyway I was able to epoxy the tray back together, and it seems to be working for now, although I've got a spare tray coming from the only guy on ebay that seems to have cd-i parts. Mine also has that common tray not going all the way in issue, so I'm looking for a new belt, but I don't exactly know what or where to look for it. But surprisingly the timekeeper battery still works.

[Thierry Henry]

@ Jamisonia,

I would have liked to advise you to head over to the specific CD-i forums http://www.cdinteractive.co.uk/forum/ to perhaps find an answer for any CD-i related issues you might have.
Problem is it's almost literally a ghost town over there.