Roadmap

No CD-i activity today, except reading Interactive Dreams and letting Bas know about this blog. As I expected, he announced it immediately :-)

I've also just announced this blog on the MESS CD-i WIP topic, the CD-i Emulator Support forum and added links to the CD-i Emulator site.

So for the new visitors (all four of you :-) a little roadmap of my current CD-i activities. You could say it's a To Do list except that I'm not that structured in my hobby activities.

1. CD-i Emulator programs

- I've been working on support for the Digital Video cartridge. It can currently play the Philips "bumper" movie of a few discs and play some MPEG audio; subsequent MPEG plays have a tendency to crash. This is currently for Gate Array MPEG cartridges only, but the IMPEG/VMPEG cartridges look to be highly similar. It needs to be made more reliable.

- I've also been fixing quite a bit of video and CDIC (Mini-MMC/Mono-I) bugs in conjuction with or triggered by the MESS CD-i work. This work continues.

- Support for chd (compressed hunks of data) disc images has been added using source code from MESS/MAME. Proper handling of subcode data needs to be added.

- Support for AVI movie saving has been added using source code from MESS/MAME. This needs a bit of polishing and doesn't currently save audio.

- Primitive support for input recording and playback has been added; needs a bit of polishing.

- DirectX support promises some performance improvements; I have skeleton code but it needs to be looked into.

- I've drafted a new video combining pass that should be substantially faster and should easily handle non-RGB24 display formats as used by DirectX; it needs to be fleshed out.

- Some new player types are partially emulated, in particular those using the 68341 so-called "Integrated CD-i Engine" (which is a great misnomer). These players tend to use a fourth CD interface chip that I've dubbed RCHIP.

- Needs savestate support to be added (partially drafted).

- Needs emulation bugs fixed (mostly on Mono-II and higher).

- Command-line version needs to be revived for movie rendering from recorded input.

2. CD-i File programs

The first version of the CD-i File Extractor (command-line tool) has been released as a CD-i disc image conversion tool (converts image to raw/cue and creates chd).

- Needs extension with "dir" and "chd" options to extract particular files within the CD-i disc image.

- Needs an interactive mode to browse the CD-i disc image.

- Needs header and sector map dumps to analyze CD-i realtime files.

- Needs to be extended with channel/sector selection to support data extraction.

- Needs to be extended with audio and video decoding to support data extraction.

- Needs to be extended with CD-i IFF parsing to support data extraction.

- Needs to be repackaged as CD-i File Player (graphical UI tool) for actual playback and display of audio and video data; should also support graphical sector maps and disc image browsing.

3. CD-i Base library

Announcement has been accidentally released by a recent website update. It is supposed to be a support library for CD-i application development.

- Needs to be started with basic initialization framework (has been drafted).

- Needs to incorporate the initialization code that I supplied to Charles Doty for Frog Feast, supporting access of the CSD (Configuration Status Descriptor) file from NVRAM and video and pointer hardware access.

- Needs to have disc playback code added (specs have been drafted).

- Needs to have sound playback code added (not even drafted).

- Sound mixing, blitting, sprite compilation, MPEG playback, etc.

4. CD-i Bits blog

The blog gremlins need to be kept fed :-)

5. CD-i Full Functional Specification (Green Book) document

The Green Book (often abbreviated FFGB) is the "bible" of CD-i application development; it incorporates the OS9 documentation (available on the ICDIA site) by reference.

There are now public links to the Green Book on the Internet. These are plaintext versions which are quite faithful renditions of the originals except that most of the ASCII art is messed up and there is no proper indexing and only rudimental cross referencing.

- Write a program to restore the ASCII art and convert to hyperlinked HTML with index and cross-reference links so that the digital Green Book becomes more useful.


And probably lots of things I forgot to mention...