CD-i Emulator Cookbook

Just a quick note that work on CD-i Emulator hasn't stopped.

I have some wild ideas about ROM-less emulation; this would basically mean re-implementing the CD-RTOS operating system. Somewhat daunting; it contains over 350 separate explicit APIs and callable entry points and many system data structures would need to be closely emulated. But it can be done, CD-ice proved it (although it took a number of shortcuts that I want to avoid).

I'm not going to tackle that by myself; my current thinking is to make a start by implementing a high-level emulation framework, tracing stubs for all the calls (luckily these can mostly be generated automatically from the digital Green Book and OS-9 manuals) and some scaffolding and samples.

One of the pieces of scaffolding would be a really simple CD-i player shell; one that just shows a big "Play CD-i" button and then starts the CD-i title :-)

For samples I'm thinking about a few easy system calls like F$CRC, F$SetCRC, F$SetSys, F$CmpNam, F$PrsNam, F$ID, F$SUser, F$Icpt, F$SigMask, F$STrap, F$Trans, F$Move, F$SSvc (I may not get through the entire list) and a new NVRAM File Manager (NRF).

It would be nice to do a minimal UCM with Video and Pointer driver so that the simple CD-i player shell would run, but that might be too much. We'll see.

However, it's the new NRF that would be the most immediately interesting for CD-i Emulator users. It would intercept NVRAM access at the file level and redirect it to the PC file system (probably to files in the the nvr directory). This would allow easy sharing of CD-i NVRAM files (e.g. game-saves) over player types or between CD-i emulator users.

To allow all of the above and clean up some dirty tricks that were needed for input playback and handling Quizard, I've done some internal restructuring of CD-i Emulator. In particular, I introduced a new "handler" class beneath the existing "device" and "memory" classes (which are now no longer derived from each other but from a common "component" base class). This restructuring isn't finished yet, but it will allow the input and Quizard stuff to become handlers instead of devices (the latter is improper because they shouldn't be visible on the CD-i system bus).

The new "module" class (a subclass of handler) will be used to add high-level emulation of OS-9 and CD-RTOS rom modules. I want to preserve the interfaces between the modules and the public data structures as much as possible, because it will allow a gradual transition from "real" to "emulated" modules.

To prepare for all of the above I had to do some fairly heavy design, which caused me to properly write down some of the design information and tradeoffs for the first time. This will be invaluable information for co-developers (if they ever materialize), hence the title "CD-i Emulator Cookbook". Well, at present it's more like a leaflet but I hope to expand it over time and also add some history.

Pieces of the cookbook will be added to the CD-i Emulator website if I feel they're ready.

I've also been giving some thought on a collaboration model for the ROM-less emulation. If there is interest I could do a partial source release that would allow other developers to work on the ROM-less emulation. This release would *not* contain any non-video chipset emulation but it would contain "generic" CD-i audio and video decoding. You would still need to use (part of) a system ROM (in particular the OS-9 kernel and file managers) until enough of the emulation is finished.

I'm still considering all this, but I wanted to get the word out to see if there is interest and to show that I haven't abandoned the project.

Potential co-developers should start boning up on OS-9 and CD-RTOS. All of the technical OS-9 documentation is online at ICDIA and links to the digital Green Book can also be found.