I worked in Sears Brand Central back in the day, and we stocked the cd i. The whole 3 years i was there, we had ONE customer who would come in every few weeks to see if we had any new games for the system. ONE CUSTOMER.
John, this video is missing digital foundries performance charts. It looks like the 0.1% lows are at 2 fps , but we have been denied our precious charts to know for sure.
"It truly was the console of the future, they just didn't think about the future." That sentence describes so many products and games to this day lmao.
"I'd rather jump and then cancel all my momentum in mid jump then fall into a pit full of spikes, wall spikes, and a pool of lava with a shark with a laser on it's head that escaped Dr. Evil's secret volcano lair then play this piece of $t! It'd be more exciting to experience the real thing!"
Amazon Prime and fibre BB? JBL cos we need to be sold crap shite? *"Becomes patreon"* where star is NOT omitted and common sense allows our future to exist. Its a happy moment of IQ and understanding given in a vocal orgasm.
So, my mom worked for Philips during the 90's and my house was full of their products. TV, Video, washing machine, dryer, everything, I even had a personal CD player in '91! I thought about getting a CDi.. F that idea...I ended up getting Japanese Sega Mega Drive!
A grew up with a kid that actually had a CDi because his parents got a discount on it working at Philips! Total turd. I was excited to play it for about two minutes, then he handed me the wand.
Not the only one who had parents working for Philips. My dad worked in a Philips factory manufacturing PCBs in the UK. We had the Video2000, DCC player, CD Players, AMPs, Tape decks all made by Philips. Luckily we dodged the CDi 😉
Yeah it's pretty mediocre, both in production and content. I thought this would be some sort of analysis or have some substantial voiceover. Still love DF tho.
As an ardent Philips CD-I defender, even I have to admit that these are three of the worst games on the CD-I. But to be fair, you guys were using the two worst controllers on the system. Literally no game plays well with these. It really needs to be played with the 3 button Genesis-style gamepad or the mouse (for shooters). This was a fun video and I sincerely hope you don't get a bunch of flack from the other dozen people in the CD-I community. The criticism were very fair though I stand by my comment that those two controllers severely impact the playing experience of any CD-I game. You haven't LIVED until you've played Thunder in Paradise on the CD-I with a mouse. Mutant Rampage Body Slam, Chaos Control, 7th Guest, Burn Cycle, Hotel Mario, and others are fun games. In closing, I'd like to say that the CD-I is the perfect kiss. A cool breeze on a warm summer day. It's perfection. I may need to go live stream my CD-I now.
Thank you for everything you do John, I love this series. You and the team at DF are absolutely killing it. Best channel on UA-cam in the video game space. Also love your guest appearances on Cane And Rinse. I also recently completed my Mean Machines magazine collection (which I grew up with when I lived in England), and I love seeing Rich there and reading his takes on games back then.
I remember watching Giant Bomb play Dark Castle on their Phillips CDi stream years back and being confounded at the gameplay. I'd love to see some high level speedrun of this game
I worked for Philips briefly. They spent $1bln on this. I realized after starting work that Philips had no idea what they were doing. I also worked with Kudo Tsunado who may still be at MS. When I saw what he was doing at MS I didn’t think he’d stay at that position for long when MS realized he didn’t have the expertise for what he was hired for.
I don’t think he’s in a leadership position anymore at MS. But not sure. Yes, you need expertise. I think MS realized he doesn’t have what is needed to lead the groups he’s been moved off of.
I felt this episode could have been more comprehensive outside of just 3-4 games, most of which were bad, especially the first game I thought too much time was devoted to it, it might be a standout title but for all the wrong reasons.....Also with this episode being quite long near 50 minutes you could have done maybe the Top 10 games on CD-i for example...
My friends and I were really curious when this came out. Then we met a kid whose parents bought one and had all kinds of educational junk with a few awful looking games. We quickly forgot about it and went back to our SNES' and Genesis.
As a kid I had a neighbor that had this system, he was so proud of owning it because it cost him a ton of money. I was like dude why didn’t you buy a snes, it’s way better. He was like, no it’s not better because the snes is cheap. I bet he regrets buying the Phillips to this day.
Most people dont know, but Big Rigs had a sequel Midnight Race Club, and dont confuse that game with Midnight Club series of good racing games by Rockstar.
The early to mid 90s was arguably the best time for sheer choice and over saturation of gaming platforms. In a way I am surprised the industry survived it as at one point it was really hard to tell which of the systems were worth investing in. Although it is also good to look back and see just how individually different they all were as there was no set standard way to design the hardware.
We've now hit a time in game hardware evolution where everything is essentially just a computer. Very little specialized hardware or features. This fact also makes the older generations of consoles so interesting to go back and play with, each console had a sound, look and feel all its own.
@@bunnyfreakz very debatable as it was probably Sony who were the ones that made the industry more streamlined after that point and helped it move forward to where it is today. As a whole it wouldn't have been that way if all the hardware manufacturers had been successful enough to survive to keep releasing platforms. Having three main platforms in terms of consoles is good enough but if there were still four or five more there would probably a lot less market share and perhaps Sony wouldn't have been as big a mainstream success as they were.
Thanks for this video. I've had my CD-i for the last 20 years and played it in-store in the early '90s yet I never realized the controller was not something sold 1:1 with the system. Guess I took mine for granted. I'm pretty sure the 4-button one is the most common, but it isn't actually 4 buttons. CD-i only has two buttons... the · button and the ·· button. Even with the 3-button controller the additional button just presses · and ·· together as a ·/·· button. Some call this "Button 3" since some software may assign the combination a different function. The 4-button one has the ·/·· button also but has a duplicate · button for an alternate thumb position. It's the exact same mold as the famous Gravis GamePad, so I'm going to see if I can reverse engineer mine and make a PCB for converting Gravis GamePads to CD-i. I do have a NOS Gravis GamePad for testing. ;) I also have the IR remote in the package, so I always assumed it was the only one sold separately. My suggestions: Defender of the Crown is pretty good on CD-i. Also, people never really discuss Tetris as one of the Nintendo titles on CD-i, but it was. Nintendo had the exclusive non-PC home and handheld rights at that time, so Tetris was definitely another fruit of the relationship that spawned Hotel Mario, Zelda's Adventure, Wand of Gamelon, and Faces of Evil. I only ever got the latter two for my CD-i. :(
OK, I looked inside and it has a custom Logitech encoder and logic chip so it won't be as simple as I'd hoped. The output is only 4 pins on the 8-pin mini-DIN so, yeah, it's encoded. I see that there are open and semi-open projects for SNES to CD-i adapters and PC to CD-i adapters so there's hope yet!
I remember seeing this system in a kiosk at Montgomery Wards back in the day and as a SEGA CD owner I remember being impressed. It's full motion video quality blew away my console.
John Linneman for James and Mike Monday! Mike:Today we're gonna play Mega Man 2 on the NES James: Yeah, it's awesome John: They chose an interesting color pallete for this game, take note of the square pattern of the background in stage 2 (James and Mike fall asleep on John)
It's incorrect to say that CDI lacked acceleration hardware. While it didn't have explicit background/sprite planes, it was a blitter type 2D accelarator, so you could dynamically compose a framebuffer consisting of multiple graphics layers, and it's entirely up to you what kind of entities would comprise those layers. Blitter is a hardware unit that accelerates copy and colour-replacement operations, and is transparency-aware. You could do quite a lot at the cost of RAM, which was unfortunately not plentiful at 1MB. You also didn't have to hand-feed the blitter engine, it would receive a command stream.
I was an owner of the top loading CD-I as a kid and I loved it. I even bought the Movie card for it and owned Movies. These games were horrible, but there were some really good games on the system too. Hotel Mario and The 7th Guest are must haves. Give the system a chance. Just backshelve those 3 games.
Oof. Getting PTSD watching this video. I used to play this in DOS, in the same era of games of Shadowgate and when I first played rogue. Loved seeing you on Smokemonster's stream for thanksgiving also John. Happy holidays.
@@emmettturner9452 guess it shows why dedicated video hardware back then was so important i mean a lot of 2d pc games of the time looked terrible compared to the console's yet pc cpu's ran circles around the console's
PCs didn't run circles around consoles. 1991 PC games looked shit, had horrible framerate, or had bare minimum movement. If you wanted a computer for games - not a toy, a computer, you'd get an Amiga. By 1995 things changed radically and now PCs were well past capabilities of 16-bit consoles based on sheer CPU power - graphics acceleration was not available to games. And yet at the same time, Playstation was already out! And it was CHEAP, which PCs still weren't, though they just started to come down in price. And Amiga was dead. As to the CDi, about half of its library came out in 1991 and 1992, after that the system fizzled out. Contrary to the video, it does have graphics acceleration hardware, a blitter-style unit, so while you didn't have fixed planes/sprites, you could compose a framebuffer by accelerated copying of images on top of each other with transparency support. The screen would be either in 4- or 8bpp mode and the former obviously has to look quite sub-par, the latter runs against 1MB RAM as a significant constraint. Still, it should probably just about rival Amiga OCS - if decent enough developers took interest, which they didn't, simply nobody cared about the box.
@@emmettturner9452 not really, the apprentice was the best looking game till almost late 90's and is a cd-i game. Actually the bosses cuphead has look like something they got from the bosses of this game
Really a fascinating system if you consider that it wasn't really meant to be a games console in the first place. It was in production for a surprisingly long time too. I hope you'll get to cover some 3DO games in the future as well.
Good video, and you're pretty much right about all four of these games. One thing, though -- Kether also has some tough puzzles in it. It's a decent game for the system. And yeah, Dimo's Quest is a good puzzle game. As for Micro Machines though, it is a disappointing port for sure. Play Accelerator instead, that game actually scrolls smoothly! Accelerator has issues but is fun, it's well worth getting. Oh, and if you're going to be playing much more CD-i, buying one of those $100 three-button controllers is essential; you'll have no more d-pad problems once you get one. They are expensive but worth it. The CD-i isn't the best system, but it's got enough interesting stuff on it to be worth looking at for sure. I agree that it should have had more graphic adventure games, that would have been great.
Whatever happened to regular DF Retro documentaries? DId you just run out of games to talk about? It seems like it's been a minute since the last time I've seen one on the channel.
I agree, because no way there are so many more classic games out there that deserve technical showcasing. Just one example is I don't think he's made a Genesis episode yet, maybe focusing on the classic Treasure games.
@@retrosoul8770 he did make a video about the Genesis Classic or whatever it was called and has done some Genesis games but there are sooo many retro games out there that he hasn't done yet that there is definitely no excuse for him to not be doing them anymore. I mean if they increased his workload on other projects I can understand but it kind of seems like he just wants to make these videos with his buddy every weekend now.
John, if you record yourself in front of a CRT, please do us younger folks a favour and apply a low-pass filter in post. There was a near constant high pitched whine throughout the entire video.
It's funny, but Dark Castle was a major Mac showpiece. Really nice animation for the time etc. Very much a Dragon's Lair style puzzle platformer. If you don't do the rooms right, you just die.
Terrible system. Not a games console. I remember this turd being really expensive, with nothing being released AT ALL that was worth even considering. The tennis game doesn't count just because of digitised sprites. Awful system. Can't even scroll properly. Crap controller. Failure.
20:40 Oof... That looks rough, and like some CGI videos from the CD era, kinda creepy. Also, those models are so rough and look like they made them within a day. I do wonder when the game switches from playing a video to gameplay, though... This is one of those cases of "spectacle moments" that failed to really impress and really, didn't need to be added to the game at all. 22:39 From just UA-cam's thumbnails shown when hovering over the seek bar, I legitimately thought I was looking at an NES game in the middle of a CD-i video. 24:31 Oh, duh, it transitions to gameplay when it stops looking low-resolution. 44:45 And the Hot Wheels Stunt Track Driver games; FMV background with collision (somehow) and 3D models placed over it. (I'm assuming it's doing the same trickery as Ocarina of Time's pre-rendered indoor backgrounds, where there's technically an invisible model that roughly matches the image, only in this case, a camera is following the same path as the video, but around a 3D environment... (I'd love to see custom **FMV** tracks for either of those games, by the way.) 45:27 I have that same curiosity about this kind of game; Like, where does it store data about when and where the player has to do things, whether that's embedded into the streamed video or if it's pre-loaded into memory before the video even plays. CD-based games in general are so strange and they make me curious about how they work and how often developers had to work around their limitations.
Interesting seeing some CD-i content here. There are a few gems on the system, but for the most part the library overall is much like what you experienced in this LP session, often times much worse. As for controls, the SNES controller adapter is a good way to go. I also highly recommend investing in a CD-i mouse or trackball. Due to the way the CD-i handles inputs, it will work with every game on the system. The results are better on some games on others, but when it works well, it works really, really well.
@Lassi Kinnunen How was CDI better than a SNES, one of the greatest consoles of all time? Maybe in some minute technical aspects, but the SNES wipes the floor with this garbage machine in most every way.
We had a Phillips CDi in my middle school's library. Me being the extreme nerd I am, I was obviously a library assistant back then and I got to play games on the CDi all the time. This was back in the 90's when dial-up internet was just starting to become mainstream.
The rare spectacle of John expressing legitimate frustration is priceless. Totally worth watching just for that🤣 if only some sort of cameo by the angry Videogame nerd could have happened...the ultimate crossover
I got one for $40.00 bucks at a pawn shop in the 90's with no games. They had no idea what it was for. Got Dragons Lair 1 and 2, Space Ace. They were the best versions for a longtime.
Interesting video. This is the first review I've seen where the CDI not being an actual game system was brought up. It's almost like trying to make video games for your DVD player or something.
If you want examples of GOOD games check out the following: Burn Cycle, The Apprentice, 7th Guest, Dragon's Lair, Space Ace, Escape from Cyber City, Name that Tune, Tetris, Pac-Attac, Hotel Mario, Chaos Control, Voyeur, The Lost Ride, Mad Dog McCree (with light gun).
How the heck have you not heard of this game?! Have you NOT heard of Angry Video Game Nerd?! You’ve done yourself a complete DISSERVICE not knowing about that guy’s existence as HE’ was the one that has familiarized people of the existence of the Genesis and CD-I versions of Dark Castle! Not this Richard Lip-stick-whoever-the-heck! I mean come on now!
Im 37 years old, and remember seeing this for sale at sears brand spanking new. LOL. I actually obtained one years later, but it was called the Maganavox CDI.
a friend of mine had the cdi and the only game I remember him having was Burn Cycle. I liked the cyberpunk theme of it, but it didn't seem fun. I imagined other games would be like that on the system, but apparently not
Parallax scrolling was evident on micro machines, but it seemed to come and go depending on speed. Unless I just imagined it. Also great video. Keep the good stuff coming.
No, it's not evident at all. I challenge you to go frame by frame and determine where parts of the background move relative to each other - they don't. This is just your mind playing tricks on you due to the low framerate and your brain having to imagine things for them to make sense.
@@SianaGearz No it's definitely there. I was sure it was an optical illusion, but it does have parallax scrolling on the vertical, which either reinforces the optical illusion theory, or points to some very interesting hardware limitations. Either way, it's interesting.
@@kevinsammut7246 I re-watched this section, and no. Look, what's happening there is that you're moving so fast that the background is displaced by about the same number of pixels every full background update as the tile size, with only a small difference. Then you have two types of background textures, those that have only high frequency detail and are very repetitive, and those that have larger-scale structure. Because of this, the high visual frequency background parts appear almost stationary (with direction dependent on the speed) while the low visual frequency background appears to move at expected speed. If you were to track the low-frequency graphics such as that diagonal wavy pattern or any of the objects with a sharp outline, and note the pixel distance between a particular detail on those and a particular detail on the high frequency texture such as the... i don't know, looks a bit like cobblestone pattern or parquet flooring pattern on the left edge, the one that appears to move slowly, you'll note that it stays exactly the same. Also for example when crossing the bridge-like structure made from rulers at 25:19, you'd expect the distant floor to move more slowly and that the amount of visible/covered far layer tile differs between frames, but it is the exact same every frame. So it is indeed an optical illusion incurred by the low framerate. It is to be said though that contrary to what the video says, the CD-i has a graphics acceleration hardware, namly a blitter, which can perform fast moves/copies and is transparency aware, and it's also mailbox-fed so it doesn't incur constant CPU waiting. So it is possible to build parallax backgrounds, though the effectiveness of that is limited by low RAM amount and low blitter performance.
There are several new drop-in timekeeper replacements that do not require batteries. And they update the storage capacity from 8kb to 32kb too. You'd definitely need a professional replace it for you if you didn't have the tools/experience, but it's much better than somebody dremeling into the chip and wiring up another battery.
but the last 2 games at least for the system were not bad at all honestly, hope you guys can test with the adapter to snes pad after so we can appreciate more
![DF Retro's Failed Consoles: Sega 32X - We Play Every Game [Part Two]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/w0JnJjdiu7w/mqdefault.jpg)
I worked in Sears Brand Central back in the day, and we stocked the cd i. The whole 3 years i was there, we had ONE customer who would come in every few weeks to see if we had any new games for the system. ONE CUSTOMER.
John, this video is missing digital foundries performance charts. It looks like the 0.1% lows are at 2 fps , but we have been denied our precious charts to know for sure.
"It truly was the console of the future, they just didn't think about the future."
That sentence describes so many products and games to this day lmao.
Really, the way this thing performs is like a NES that has a video chip built in.
13:20 Rare footage of John actually angry.
Haha it's funny waiting to see if it will break him into a wild rage. He should try an AVGN style/parody video.
'Ass! What were they thinking?'
3rd Strike meta meme right there
"I'd rather jump and then cancel all my momentum in mid jump then fall into a pit full of spikes, wall spikes, and a pool of lava with a shark with a laser on it's head that escaped Dr. Evil's secret volcano lair then play this piece of $t! It'd be more exciting to experience the real thing!"
Amazon Prime and fibre BB?
JBL cos we need to be sold crap shite?
*"Becomes patreon"* where star is NOT omitted and common sense allows our future to exist.
Its a happy moment of IQ and understanding given in a vocal orgasm.
It's so nice to have a good channel on UA-cam where you don't feel like you're being shouted at for 15 minutes.
"WhAaAaAt's gOinG gUuUuYs!!!" lol
I expected a tech analyses of the hardware itself
Feels like DF retro hasn't had a proper retrospective/analysis video in quite some time.
Very true. I'm not a fan of these let's play and talk videos.
@@Edexote
Me neither. They're not engaging or interesting to me.
I don't mind them, sometimes its interesting listening to them chat while playing obscure games
I wish they would label it something besides DF Retro because all it does is get people to click on a video they don't want to watch.
So, my mom worked for Philips during the 90's and my house was full of their products. TV, Video, washing machine, dryer, everything, I even had a personal CD player in '91! I thought about getting a CDi.. F that idea...I ended up getting Japanese Sega Mega Drive!
'90s, not 90's
A grew up with a kid that actually had a CDi because his parents got a discount on it working at Philips! Total turd. I was excited to play it for about two minutes, then he handed me the wand.
Not the only one who had parents working for Philips. My dad worked in a Philips factory manufacturing PCBs in the UK. We had the Video2000, DCC player, CD Players, AMPs, Tape decks all made by Philips. Luckily we dodged the CDi 😉
@@cptnoremac 🤣
I had a CDI.
The Golf and Tennis games were spectacular for the time.
Oh, and 7th Guest and Burn cycle were sweet too.
I played Caesars world of boxing just to sleep with groupies
Not gonna lie. This is a rough 49 minutes.
Made it to 2mins
First DF video I couldn't watch through. Had to skim it and that kind of hurt.
Yeah it's pretty mediocre, both in production and content. I thought this would be some sort of analysis or have some substantial voiceover. Still love DF tho.
As an ardent Philips CD-I defender, even I have to admit that these are three of the worst games on the CD-I. But to be fair, you guys were using the two worst controllers on the system. Literally no game plays well with these. It really needs to be played with the 3 button Genesis-style gamepad or the mouse (for shooters).
This was a fun video and I sincerely hope you don't get a bunch of flack from the other dozen people in the CD-I community. The criticism were very fair though I stand by my comment that those two controllers severely impact the playing experience of any CD-I game.
You haven't LIVED until you've played Thunder in Paradise on the CD-I with a mouse. Mutant Rampage Body Slam, Chaos Control, 7th Guest, Burn Cycle, Hotel Mario, and others are fun games.
In closing, I'd like to say that the CD-I is the perfect kiss. A cool breeze on a warm summer day. It's perfection. I may need to go live stream my CD-I now.
I knew Yahel would jump on this video like a fly on Sega Saturn poop !
@@hossthadude_252 If you say "CD-I" 3 times or post a CD-I video, I appear.
Thank you for everything you do John, I love this series. You and the team at DF are absolutely killing it. Best channel on UA-cam in the video game space. Also love your guest appearances on Cane And Rinse. I also recently completed my Mean Machines magazine collection (which I grew up with when I lived in England), and I love seeing Rich there and reading his takes on games back then.
This has to be the best Dark Castle gameplay I've witnesed
Yeah, I don't think I've ever seen a stage being beat.
@KMSMista I remember checking other ports of the game
I remember watching Giant Bomb play Dark Castle on their Phillips CDi stream years back and being confounded at the gameplay. I'd love to see some high level speedrun of this game
@@Sandwich1414 Dark Castle CD-I any% in 3 days, 4 hours, 41 minutes and 46 seconds.
38:32 -Audi: "So now you can walk on water"
-John: "I didn't think this is gonna get religious"
-Me: 🤣🤣🤣
I worked for Philips briefly. They spent $1bln on this. I realized after starting work that Philips had no idea what they were doing. I also worked with Kudo Tsunado who may still be at MS. When I saw what he was doing at MS I didn’t think he’d stay at that position for long when MS realized he didn’t have the expertise for what he was hired for.
Expertise? He's an executive. Expertise of an executive is people, not tech or art. At least that's how big companies are run, for better or worse.
I don’t think he’s in a leadership position anymore at MS. But not sure. Yes, you need expertise. I think MS realized he doesn’t have what is needed to lead the groups he’s been moved off of.
I felt this episode could have been more comprehensive outside of just 3-4 games, most of which were bad, especially the first game I thought too much time was devoted to it, it might be a standout title but for all the wrong reasons.....Also with this episode being quite long near 50 minutes you could have done maybe the Top 10 games on CD-i for example...
The nerd has reviewed these consoles so that the rest of us don't.
My friends and I were really curious when this came out. Then we met a kid whose parents bought one and had all kinds of educational junk with a few awful looking games. We quickly forgot about it and went back to our SNES' and Genesis.
...I was expecting one of the Zelda games.
they quite rare and expensive, a least some of them.
Well excuuuuuuuuse me, princess.
Everybody knows about them and the mario one, though. Much more fun to show something truly obscure that has never been seen before.
I've played the first one... and actually liked it.
...I was expecting the year 3k to provide more IQ.
That constant CRT high pitched hum in the background hurts :(
It was perfectly fine until you mentioned it lol. Now I find it difficult to watch the video
I wondered how many people would notice that.
@@jalapaeno They keep praising CRTs but they had some really big problems like this one
For once I feel lucky being unable to hear frequencies above 14-15khz
It's oddly comforting
As a kid I had a neighbor that had this system, he was so proud of owning it because it cost him a ton of money. I was like dude why didn’t you buy a snes, it’s way better. He was like, no it’s not better because the snes is cheap. I bet he regrets buying the Phillips to this day.
Worse than Big Rigs?
Btw 1 Million subs soon DF!
Most people dont know, but Big Rigs had a sequel Midnight Race Club, and dont confuse that game with Midnight Club series of good racing games by Rockstar.
The early to mid 90s was arguably the best time for sheer choice and over saturation of gaming platforms. In a way I am surprised the industry survived it as at one point it was really hard to tell which of the systems were worth investing in. Although it is also good to look back and see just how individually different they all were as there was no set standard way to design the hardware.
We've now hit a time in game hardware evolution where everything is essentially just a computer. Very little specialized hardware or features. This fact also makes the older generations of consoles so interesting to go back and play with, each console had a sound, look and feel all its own.
Industry survived because Nintendo once again.
@@bunnyfreakz very debatable as it was probably Sony who were the ones that made the industry more streamlined after that point and helped it move forward to where it is today. As a whole it wouldn't have been that way if all the hardware manufacturers had been successful enough to survive to keep releasing platforms. Having three main platforms in terms of consoles is good enough but if there were still four or five more there would probably a lot less market share and perhaps Sony wouldn't have been as big a mainstream success as they were.
Thanks for this video. I've had my CD-i for the last 20 years and played it in-store in the early '90s yet I never realized the controller was not something sold 1:1 with the system. Guess I took mine for granted. I'm pretty sure the 4-button one is the most common, but it isn't actually 4 buttons.
CD-i only has two buttons... the · button and the ·· button. Even with the 3-button controller the additional button just presses · and ·· together as a ·/·· button. Some call this "Button 3" since some software may assign the combination a different function.
The 4-button one has the ·/·· button also but has a duplicate · button for an alternate thumb position. It's the exact same mold as the famous Gravis GamePad, so I'm going to see if I can reverse engineer mine and make a PCB for converting Gravis GamePads to CD-i. I do have a NOS Gravis GamePad for testing. ;)
I also have the IR remote in the package, so I always assumed it was the only one sold separately.
My suggestions: Defender of the Crown is pretty good on CD-i. Also, people never really discuss Tetris as one of the Nintendo titles on CD-i, but it was. Nintendo had the exclusive non-PC home and handheld rights at that time, so Tetris was definitely another fruit of the relationship that spawned Hotel Mario, Zelda's Adventure, Wand of Gamelon, and Faces of Evil. I only ever got the latter two for my CD-i. :(
OK, I looked inside and it has a custom Logitech encoder and logic chip so it won't be as simple as I'd hoped. The output is only 4 pins on the 8-pin mini-DIN so, yeah, it's encoded. I see that there are open and semi-open projects for SNES to CD-i adapters and PC to CD-i adapters so there's hope yet!
I remember seeing this system in a kiosk at Montgomery Wards back in the day and as a SEGA CD owner I remember being impressed. It's full motion video quality blew away my console.
John Linneman for James and Mike Monday!
Mike:Today we're gonna play Mega Man 2 on the NES
James: Yeah, it's awesome
John: They chose an interesting color pallete for this game, take note of the square pattern of the background in stage 2
(James and Mike fall asleep on John)
That be great. I would actually love to see them in a video with James and Mike. Or even a AVGN segment.
It's incorrect to say that CDI lacked acceleration hardware. While it didn't have explicit background/sprite planes, it was a blitter type 2D accelarator, so you could dynamically compose a framebuffer consisting of multiple graphics layers, and it's entirely up to you what kind of entities would comprise those layers. Blitter is a hardware unit that accelerates copy and colour-replacement operations, and is transparency-aware. You could do quite a lot at the cost of RAM, which was unfortunately not plentiful at 1MB. You also didn't have to hand-feed the blitter engine, it would receive a command stream.
I was an owner of the top loading CD-I as a kid and I loved it. I even bought the Movie card for it and owned Movies. These games were horrible, but there were some really good games on the system too. Hotel Mario and The 7th Guest are must haves. Give the system a chance. Just backshelve those 3 games.
the apprentice, look it up. Best looking game of the early 90's
Oof. Getting PTSD watching this video. I used to play this in DOS, in the same era of games of Shadowgate and when I first played rogue.
Loved seeing you on Smokemonster's stream for thanksgiving also John. Happy holidays.
I remember my dad almost buying us one of these when it came out. Close call!
Why does this console's graphics look like 1990s ms paint
Because it's from around 1991 and can't do much else than show static bitmaps.
@@emmettturner9452 guess it shows why dedicated video hardware back then was so important i mean a lot of 2d pc games of the time looked terrible compared to the console's yet pc cpu's ran circles around the console's
90s MS paint looked better than this. I can confirm that.
PCs didn't run circles around consoles. 1991 PC games looked shit, had horrible framerate, or had bare minimum movement. If you wanted a computer for games - not a toy, a computer, you'd get an Amiga.
By 1995 things changed radically and now PCs were well past capabilities of 16-bit consoles based on sheer CPU power - graphics acceleration was not available to games. And yet at the same time, Playstation was already out! And it was CHEAP, which PCs still weren't, though they just started to come down in price. And Amiga was dead.
As to the CDi, about half of its library came out in 1991 and 1992, after that the system fizzled out. Contrary to the video, it does have graphics acceleration hardware, a blitter-style unit, so while you didn't have fixed planes/sprites, you could compose a framebuffer by accelerated copying of images on top of each other with transparency support. The screen would be either in 4- or 8bpp mode and the former obviously has to look quite sub-par, the latter runs against 1MB RAM as a significant constraint. Still, it should probably just about rival Amiga OCS - if decent enough developers took interest, which they didn't, simply nobody cared about the box.
@@emmettturner9452 not really, the apprentice was the best looking game till almost late 90's and is a cd-i game. Actually the bosses cuphead has look like something they got from the bosses of this game
i may come back to this video when im older, because this hight pitch noise is to much for me, im sorry
Really a fascinating system if you consider that it wasn't really meant to be a games console in the first place. It was in production for a surprisingly long time too.
I hope you'll get to cover some 3DO games in the future as well.
I've never heard anyone pronounce Galaga like that before.
Right! Exactly what i thought..... I guess he gets a pass being German, but still
Apparently that's how it's supposed to be pronounced. It does sound weird, though.
Bubsy's dark castle coming soon exclusive to google stadia
Good video, and you're pretty much right about all four of these games. One thing, though -- Kether also has some tough puzzles in it. It's a decent game for the system. And yeah, Dimo's Quest is a good puzzle game. As for Micro Machines though, it is a disappointing port for sure. Play Accelerator instead, that game actually scrolls smoothly! Accelerator has issues but is fun, it's well worth getting. Oh, and if you're going to be playing much more CD-i, buying one of those $100 three-button controllers is essential; you'll have no more d-pad problems once you get one. They are expensive but worth it. The CD-i isn't the best system, but it's got enough interesting stuff on it to be worth looking at for sure. I agree that it should have had more graphic adventure games, that would have been great.
the apprentice
When I got this notification, I was like "_Zelda_, definitely." But oooh, boy. I was wrong.
Whatever happened to regular DF Retro documentaries? DId you just run out of games to talk about? It seems like it's been a minute since the last time I've seen one on the channel.
I agree, because no way there are so many more classic games out there that deserve technical showcasing. Just one example is I don't think he's made a Genesis episode yet, maybe focusing on the classic Treasure games.
@@retrosoul8770 he did make a video about the Genesis Classic or whatever it was called and has done some Genesis games but there are sooo many retro games out there that he hasn't done yet that there is definitely no excuse for him to not be doing them anymore.
I mean if they increased his workload on other projects I can understand but it kind of seems like he just wants to make these videos with his buddy every weekend now.
I 'memba playing this at my cousin's house. He had more dollars than sense. But he did have a rear projection CRT, so it looked amazing.
John, if you record yourself in front of a CRT, please do us younger folks a favour and apply a low-pass filter in post.
There was a near constant high pitched whine throughout the entire video.
The noise is very uncomfortable 😬
Reminds me of the video Tom Scott did some time ago
The goal of having the worst games collection of all time is quite admirable Alex 🤔😂☠️🚯
It's funny, but Dark Castle was a major Mac showpiece. Really nice animation for the time etc. Very much a Dragon's Lair style puzzle platformer. If you don't do the rooms right, you just die.
how did you capture the footage for this video?
did you use composite video or was the system RGB modded?
I’m using the PAL 220 system which has native RGB output. Sadly, that also means it’s 50hz.
Terrible system. Not a games console.
I remember this turd being really expensive, with nothing being released AT ALL that was worth even considering. The tennis game doesn't count just because of digitised sprites.
Awful system. Can't even scroll properly. Crap controller. Failure.
I remember playing so much Dark Castle on the Mac. The controls made so much more sense with a mouse.
Robert Merritt funny enough the CDi has a mouse as well. I doubt that would enhance its playability though.
you know, going to hell would _technically_ be a "religious experience..."
speaking of batteries in consoles, is there a way to mod the sega saturn so you don't lose all of your save data when the battery dies?
The easiest fix is to buy a backup cartridge.
20:40 Oof... That looks rough, and like some CGI videos from the CD era, kinda creepy. Also, those models are so rough and look like they made them within a day. I do wonder when the game switches from playing a video to gameplay, though... This is one of those cases of "spectacle moments" that failed to really impress and really, didn't need to be added to the game at all.
22:39 From just UA-cam's thumbnails shown when hovering over the seek bar, I legitimately thought I was looking at an NES game in the middle of a CD-i video.
24:31 Oh, duh, it transitions to gameplay when it stops looking low-resolution.
44:45 And the Hot Wheels Stunt Track Driver games; FMV background with collision (somehow) and 3D models placed over it. (I'm assuming it's doing the same trickery as Ocarina of Time's pre-rendered indoor backgrounds, where there's technically an invisible model that roughly matches the image, only in this case, a camera is following the same path as the video, but around a 3D environment... (I'd love to see custom **FMV** tracks for either of those games, by the way.)
45:27 I have that same curiosity about this kind of game; Like, where does it store data about when and where the player has to do things, whether that's embedded into the streamed video or if it's pre-loaded into memory before the video even plays. CD-based games in general are so strange and they make me curious about how they work and how often developers had to work around their limitations.
The Vision Factory had developers who were members of the ST demo scene, so they knew how to code for a system with no hardware scrolling...
Hi can i ask a question will my ps4 pro supersample on 4k tv if i change the ps4 resaloution to 1080p or is it just for 1080p tvs?0
Interesting seeing some CD-i content here. There are a few gems on the system, but for the most part the library overall is much like what you experienced in this LP session, often times much worse. As for controls, the SNES controller adapter is a good way to go. I also highly recommend investing in a CD-i mouse or trackball. Due to the way the CD-i handles inputs, it will work with every game on the system. The results are better on some games on others, but when it works well, it works really, really well.
13:21 channeling the inner AVGN.
3:00 The way he pronounces "Galaga."
Just remember somewhere in time that this was state of the art.
Yeah it was bad at release, I was playing Amiga games that blasted this year's before.
@Lassi Kinnunen How was CDI better than a SNES, one of the greatest consoles of all time? Maybe in some minute technical aspects, but the SNES wipes the floor with this garbage machine in most every way.
We had a Phillips CDi in my middle school's library. Me being the extreme nerd I am, I was obviously a library assistant back then and I got to play games on the CDi all the time. This was back in the 90's when dial-up internet was just starting to become mainstream.
18:23 what is this beautiful eerie ambient music? Is it console's?
That’s from the wonderful Lost Eden soundtrack!
The rare spectacle of John expressing legitimate frustration is priceless. Totally worth watching just for that🤣 if only some sort of cameo by the angry Videogame nerd could have happened...the ultimate crossover
That's not a game, it's a torture device.
I got one for $40.00 bucks at a pawn shop in the 90's with no games. They had no idea what it was for. Got Dragons Lair 1 and 2, Space Ace. They were the best versions for a longtime.
I too was expecting a tech analysis, but I'm thoroughly laughing at John losing his cool
Cdi actually had alot of cool stuff on it. My mom still plays the horrorscope disc to this day!
No Zelda CDi game? :(
"I want to explore this in more detail later" video is 49 minutes
@John James Rambo dude it was a joke wtf
Ceasers world of boxing, enough said. I loved this console Burn Cycle & 7th Guest were so great
you forgot the apprentice ( best looking game of that time ever ) and mutant rampage
Was that Phil Hartman in that commercial in the beginning?
Interesting video. This is the first review I've seen where the CDI not being an actual game system was brought up. It's almost like trying to make video games for your DVD player or something.
This video has an extremely high-pitched tone running all the way through it. Always love the content guys, but please check your mics!
and still i was dreaming of having one at the time.
Oh I remember this one! It has to be one of the worst consoles ever released!
If you want examples of GOOD games check out the following:
Burn Cycle, The Apprentice, 7th Guest, Dragon's Lair, Space Ace, Escape from Cyber City, Name that Tune, Tetris, Pac-Attac, Hotel Mario, Chaos Control, Voyeur, The Lost Ride, Mad Dog McCree (with light gun).
Can anyone tell me what hardware I would need to begin developing games for Sega Saturn?
How the heck have you not heard of this game?! Have you NOT heard of Angry Video Game Nerd?! You’ve done yourself a complete DISSERVICE not knowing about that guy’s existence as HE’ was the one that has familiarized people of the existence of the Genesis and CD-I versions of Dark Castle! Not this Richard Lip-stick-whoever-the-heck! I mean come on now!
Im 37 years old, and remember seeing this for sale at sears brand spanking new. LOL. I actually obtained one years later, but it was called the Maganavox CDI.
Dark Castle... ray-traced lol
Dark Castle is the Dark Souls of bad games
The Bang & Olufsen BeoCentre AV5 Philips cdi console is the best console ever created because you can play any game from any console on it.
Was the guy in Atari age able to help ya out?
Please refer to AVGN. This is well documented and has been solved. Also, bizarre Congo reference. This episode is a treat.
Lol, I actually had it when I was a kid....good memories)
Great to See a Video about the CDI as DF Retro, but Please dont Play Bad Games 15 minutes Long.
Why is the dialogue so quiet? And there's a high pitch screech during most of the video.
Frequency is 15656 hz. Measured with the Spectroid app. I can't hear over 13500 hz.
Video starts at 17:41 (As in, that's when they stop playing the horrendous Dark Castle!)
You can never be "too" retro but as long as it's good retro not bad retro
The best game for the CDi was The Palm Springs Open!
a friend of mine had the cdi and the only game I remember him having was Burn Cycle. I liked the cyberpunk theme of it, but it didn't seem fun. I imagined other games would be like that on the system, but apparently not
Oh my god, that Dark Castle was painful even to watch!
Parallax scrolling was evident on micro machines, but it seemed to come and go depending on speed. Unless I just imagined it. Also great video. Keep the good stuff coming.
No, it's not evident at all. I challenge you to go frame by frame and determine where parts of the background move relative to each other - they don't. This is just your mind playing tricks on you due to the low framerate and your brain having to imagine things for them to make sense.
@@SianaGearz No it's definitely there. I was sure it was an optical illusion, but it does have parallax scrolling on the vertical, which either reinforces the optical illusion theory, or points to some very interesting hardware limitations. Either way, it's interesting.
@@SianaGearz skip to 25:20 and use frame advance. By the time you get to 25:22 you'll see it.
@@kevinsammut7246 I re-watched this section, and no. Look, what's happening there is that you're moving so fast that the background is displaced by about the same number of pixels every full background update as the tile size, with only a small difference. Then you have two types of background textures, those that have only high frequency detail and are very repetitive, and those that have larger-scale structure. Because of this, the high visual frequency background parts appear almost stationary (with direction dependent on the speed) while the low visual frequency background appears to move at expected speed.
If you were to track the low-frequency graphics such as that diagonal wavy pattern or any of the objects with a sharp outline, and note the pixel distance between a particular detail on those and a particular detail on the high frequency texture such as the... i don't know, looks a bit like cobblestone pattern or parquet flooring pattern on the left edge, the one that appears to move slowly, you'll note that it stays exactly the same. Also for example when crossing the bridge-like structure made from rulers at 25:19, you'd expect the distant floor to move more slowly and that the amount of visible/covered far layer tile differs between frames, but it is the exact same every frame.
So it is indeed an optical illusion incurred by the low framerate.
It is to be said though that contrary to what the video says, the CD-i has a graphics acceleration hardware, namly a blitter, which can perform fast moves/copies and is transparency aware, and it's also mailbox-fed so it doesn't incur constant CPU waiting. So it is possible to build parallax backgrounds, though the effectiveness of that is limited by low RAM amount and low blitter performance.
Oh, man. I bought one. And an Amiga CD32. And an Atari Jaguar. Jesus, who am I?
*buys a Stadia*
ah the good old days, i used to write software and development tools for CDi back in the early 90's (pre-internet days). Fun times.
50 minute video on the CD-I! I am in heaven! I have 3 different models (with digital video cartridges) and I love them all equally.
There are several new drop-in timekeeper replacements that do not require batteries. And they update the storage capacity from 8kb to 32kb too. You'd definitely need a professional replace it for you if you didn't have the tools/experience, but it's much better than somebody dremeling into the chip and wiring up another battery.
Do you have a link by any chance? That sounds great.
It's only at around minute 42 that they mention Animation Magic, a.k.a. the devs of the Zelda CD-i games. That has to be a record.
♪ It's gonna take you back to the past ♫
♪ It's the angry df retro nerrrrd ♫
my god these games are so frustrating omg
but the last 2 games at least for the system were not bad at all honestly, hope you guys can test with the adapter to snes pad after so we can appreciate more
Spent a day figuring how to run the thing on retropie. As soon i played those Links games instantly regreted the time i spent setting this up.
>Chooses to do the CDi >feels guilty you have to be negative
29:25 OK, is it just me or does Dimo's cutscene voice sound like it's done by Tommy Chong?
The high pitch audio is killing my ears
CRT. The sound of one childhood.
@@verficationaccount Yea I was always sensitive to it , and could tell if a TV was on standby when walking into my house.
I liked the old formate. This new “let’s play” formate is not...
Alright man child
@@TheKingOfSlimeBaby your comment makes no sense, you just wanted to be mean and weren't smart enough to make it relevant
Thanks for the idea. I'll be saving space and using the CD-I as a base for a PVM
John, do people under 25 a favour and use a highpass filter, the CRT is causing a very high pitched sound and it kinda hurts to listen to the video
Burn Cycle considered by many the best CDi game. I hope you can make a gameplay video of it in the future.