Early this week, CDinteractive.co.uk forum user Erroneous came by and we spent an interesting evening taking apart our CDI 18x units and figuring out serial ports.
Whereas my set consists of a CDI 180/37 and a CDI 181/37 unit, his set is the full 180/181/182 ensemble with the added bonus of supporting 220V power. I was not previously aware that such units even existed, but it turns out he has a 180/20 + 181/20 + 182/00 combination.
I’ve taken some photographs from his set, both intact and in various dismantled states, and these can be found here on the CD-i Emulator website. Nothing particularly surprising except for the small size ROM in the 182 unit, it’s only a pair of 27C512 chips which hold 32 KB each for a total of only 64 KB!
Erroneous sold me his spare CD-i 180 remote unit and serial port adapter so I now have a mostly functioning CD-i 180 set. Unfortunately, it turns out that my 180 CD drive unit has problems so I cannot play actual discs, but the set works fine using the E1 Emulator.
It turned out that his set, however, has some defect in the 181 MMC unit which prevents it from reading discs, either from the 180 CD drive or from the E1 Emulator. Using my 181 and his 180 and 182 units we managed to get a fully working set, albeit running on mixed 120V / 220V wall power!
Because at first we couldn’t get a working command prompt on the serial port of his 182 unit, he undertook to solder a spare DB9 connector to the 181/182 interconnection bus, based on the pinout of the serial adapter which attaches to that same bus (which matches the pinout I had previously figured out by tracing the circuit board). This gave output but not a working command prompt either.
It finally turned out to be a feature of the OS9 System Disk that we were using; it boots properly when you select “Floppy Application” from the “System” menu, but it’s final step starts a command prompt for the /term device and it turns out there is no such device in the 180 player. It has three (!) serial port devices but they are named /t0, /t01 and /t2 (see below) whereas the 60x players for which this disk was apparently intended do have a /term device. On the 180, avoiding the startup script by choosing “System” / “CD-RTOS” works fine however.
When we figured this out, we could get a command line prompt on either serial port, the ROMs are smart enough to select the device where a terminal is actually connected.
We confirmed that the serial I/O chip in the 182 unit is indeed an 68681 chip as I previously suspected, which supports two serial port devices of which only one has a connector on the outside of the unit. The connected device is supported with the /t0 device name, the unconnected one uses /t01. In addition to the 68070 built-in serial port this means that the 181+182 combination actually has three serial ports, but the usual hardware setup makes only one of them accessible at a time (connecting the units uses up the interconnection bus which means that the serial adapter cannot be connected at the same time).
At this point, it was getting late and Erroneous departed for home, graciously allowing me to temporarily borrow his 18x set for some more experimentation and dumping.
When the serial port allowed me to take look inside the running 180 player, it turned out that the four ROMs that I previously dumped were not in fact co-located in the address space. The “system” ROM pair lives at $180000 as expected but on Maxi-MMC it is only 256 KB; the other 256 KB ROM pair lives at $700000 (I’ve called it the “asset” ROM because it contains only a font and pictures). Leaving out the asset ROM inside CD-i Emulator gives a working player but without any background images or buttons, just the text over a black background. You can still start a CD-i application of play a CD-Audio disc, though...
Another small factoid is that the 182 ROM contains a single picture ps_child.dyuv that at first appears to be a revised version of the identically-named one in the 181 ROM, but both pictures are bitwise identical except for the module edition number and CRC. Weird...
Dumping the ROMs of Erroneous’s 181 set turned up nothing new; they are bitwise identical to the ones from my own unit (not really surprising as both units have big “1.1” stickers on the back which signifies the “final” ROM update that all Philips 18x players received shortly before the market introduction of CD-i).
Having the 182 unit ROMs I have now extended CD-i Emulator to also support the two additional serial ports, even though the second of these is not usable on the actual player! The floppy controller and the parallel and SCSI port remain for the future.
Later this week I also took apart my new CD-i 180 remote unit, which can be used over infrared but also supports a cable connection (I’ll need to make my own cable). Pictures of this are on my site here. I suspected that the interconnection would use the I2C protocol and this indeed turned out to be the case. The unit contains another 84C21 mask-programmable microprocessor labeled “REMOCON Ver. 2.0” and its I2C SDA and SCLK pins are more or less directly connected to the cable connector, which also has RESET, GND and +5V power connections. This should allow me to connect any home-brewn pointing device over I2C.
From a bit of running system and driver inspection I also found out some more details about the bus locations of the floppy and SCSI controller chips in the 182 unit. There are two surprisingly empty ROM sockets on the SCSI extension board that are probably intended for SCSI driver and application software; except for booting support the other ROMs contain none of this.
With the information learned so far I have expanded the cditypes.rul file with CD-i 180 ROM recognition and put it in the CD-i Types section of the site.
Having two working floppy drives also allowed me to review my CD-i floppy collection and most of those appear to be perfectly readable; they may yet turn out to contain something interesting.
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