CD-i 180 disc playing

After a few hours of tweaking I’ve gotten CD-i 180 disc playing working in CD-i Emulator. Most of the time was spent on basic disassembly of the driver, which is very similar to the CD-i 605 version (but missing some features such as multi-session support and seek delay). Not very surprising as both players use the same CDIC chip, although they are supposedly different versions.

The problems were really quite trivial but there are of course complications...

The first problem turned out to be a memory map issue. On all CD-i players that I’ve encountered so far, a memory map chunk size of 128 KB works fine because memory from different devices (whether general purpose RAM or device-specific memory such as NVRAM and CDIC local memory) never lives inside the same 128 KB chunk of address space. On the CD-i 180 this is not true, as can be seen from the following fragment of maximmc.brd:

$00300000   cdic.dev     level=4
$00310000   nvr.dev

My code silently overwrote the CDIC mapping with the NVR mapping which meant that any access to CDIC local memory terminated in a bus error. Needless to say, this was not conducive to disc playback. Simply lowering the memory map chunk size to 64 KB fixed this problem.

Next it turned out that during initialization the cdap18x driver wants to do some kind of data transfer to address $320001, possibly DSP parameters or something, and there was no device there yet. This was easily fixed also.

At this point the disc play got started but the interrupt routine ignored all interrupts. After inspecting the driver it turned out that the CD-i 180 expects an additional status bit to be set in the DBUF register that was never used on other CD-i players with a CDIC. Still easy to fix.

Now the interrupt routine started trying to process the sector but it got bus errors in two places. It attempted to read the FILE selection register, which other CD-i players never did, and it took the buffer index bits (these specify the DMA buffer the hardware used from the sector) from a previously unimplemented register that I’ve dubbed DSEL for now. Easy fixes galore...

After this one sector got properly transferred to memory but an unending stream of interrupts hung up the player. It turns out that the CD-i 180 ROMs don’t read the CDIC XBUF register that CD-i Emulator used to clear the interrupt. Generating and clearing the interrupt from the DBUF register fixed that also, and now the disc actually started playing!

Of course I did some tests next and there are currently three known problems:

- Reads of the disc table-of-contents (TOC) take ages, probably because the ROMs are checking for or waiting on some flag or data byte that CD-i Emulator currently doesn’t provide. This should not be very hard to fix.

- Audio playback from memory doesn’t work, the symptoms are very similar to those of the audio sync issues that occurred during the MESS collaboration in 2009. This may be a hard problem to crack.

- And finally the most hairy issue: the CDIC emulation modifications break other players. The breakage is often subtle but very definitely there so I will have to do some careful juggling to get it working on all players, if necessary by explicit version checking but I hope to avoid that. The hardware should not be that dissimilar, really...

On the serial port and pointing device front, I’ve found someone who has a surplus serial port interface and an infrared remote. He also has a complete CD-i 180 set (including the CDI 182 unit) and I’m looking forward to extracting the ROMs from that one also.

He also took apart his mouse and it seems to be a fairly standard Amiga design which means that it should not be very hard to manufacture a replacement.

I’ve been looking into making a small PIC-based interface for PS2 and/or CD-i peripherals and it may still come to that but it seems to be not as necessary as I thought.