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An experimental multiplatform Philips CD-i emulator written in C++17. (∩ ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)⊃━☆ﾟ. *

Features

  • Mono-I board (CDI 200, CDI 220/20) fully supported, can run commercial game discs and homebrew
  • Mono-II and Mono-IV boards are partially supported, can run player shell but disc emulation is not available.
  • Emulation of the fluorescent tube display (FTD) on the player's front-facing panel
  • Partial audio support (soundmap playback via CPU is not 100%, but can read audio sectors from disc fine)
  • Experimental controller emulation
    • This is still not sorted out due to the nature of the CD-i pointing device being an absolute and not relative (i.e. tablet-style) type. This works fine for the player shell but translates to wanky controls on actual CD-i games.
  • And most importantly: confirmed to run on Windows, macOS (courtesy of yeah-its-gloria), (v)Wii, Wii U (WUHB) and 3DS. May not run up to fullspeed on all builds.

Credits

Special credits to Stovent, CD-i Fan and Slamy for helping me wherever possible on this project. The emulator uses Musashi version 4.10 as a core for the 68070 processor.

Some of the emulation code is ported or adapted from:

  • CD-i Fan's cdichips documentation of several components including the MCD212, SCC68070 (UART), IKAT and SLAVE
  • Slamy's documentation of the CDIC (see CDIC_BlackBoxAnalyzer)
  • Stovent's implementations of the relevant components in CeDImu (license unknown)
  • the MAME CD-i driver by Vincent Halver and Ryan Holtz (licensed under BSD-3) (global MAME license)
  • reverse engineering of the CD-i Emulator trace log

License

The general code for this emulator is released under GPLv3 (see above credits for other licenses).

Usage

Windows / macOS

Run miniCDi using the command line arguments miniCDi <boot.rom> [disc.bin]. Alternatively, drag the system ROM file itself into miniCDi to boot the emulated system from the ROM, then drag the disc image into the emulator window.

Controls

CD-i pointing device Mouse (if focused) Keyboard
Button 1 Left-click Enter
Button 2 Right-click Space bar
Directional buttons Cursor movement Arrow keys
Reset emulator - R
Play button on FP - E
Toggle FTD - F
Toggle frame limit - T
Change resolution - V

Nintendo Wii

Place the system ROM(s) in sd:/miniCDi/rom and any disc images/games in sd:/miniCDi/discs.

Once opened, select a disc image from the menu. Press Home (Wii) or Z (GameCube) to exit emulation and return to the emulator menu. In some cases the CD-i machine may not start properly. If this happens try going back to the emulator menu and starting over (this may take several tries).

Controls

CD-i pointing device Wii Remote Wii Classic Controller
Button 1 1 A
Button 2 2 B
Directional buttons D-Pad D-Pad
Play button on FP - Plus
Reset emulator Minus Minus

GameCube controller support is currently only available in the GameCube build.

Nintendo 3DS

Place the system ROM(s) in sdmc:/3ds/miniCDi/rom and any disc images/games in sdmc:/3ds/miniCDi/discs.

Once opened, select a disc image from the menu. Press ZR to quit the emulator.

Controls

CD-i pointing device Nintendo 3DS
Button 1 A
Button 2 B
Directional buttons D-Pad or Circle Pad
Play button on FP START
Reset emulator SELECT

Nintendo Wii U

Place the system ROM(s) in /vol/external01/wiiu/apps/miniCDi/rom and any disc images/games in /vol/external01/wiiu/apps/miniCDi/discs.

Once opened, select a disc image from the menu. Press ZR to exit emulation and return to the emulator menu. In some cases the CD-i machine may not start properly. If this happens try going back to the emulator menu and starting over (this may take several tries).

Controls

CD-i pointing device Wii U GamePad
Button 1 A
Button 2 B
Directional buttons D-Pad or left stick
Play button on FP START
Reset emulator SELECT

Configuration

The emulation settings can be configured in config.ini relative to the emulator's executable (e.g. .exe, .dol, .3dsx, etc). These are compiled courtesy of the mINI library.

An example of the default settings:

[cdi]
autosavenvram=0
testplug=0
pal=1
analogcolors=0

[minicdi]
frameskip=0
pointeradvance=0
logging=0

Setting the video mode setting to 0 (NTSC) may negatively affect emulation speed. Frameskip may help on slower consoles but may not reach 100% speed.

Technical details

Compatibility

The following boards and chips have been implemented. CD-i Fan has more information regarding hardware at cdichips repository.

  • Mono-I: SCC68070, MCD212, CDIC, SLAVE
  • Mono-II: SCC68070, MCD212, DRVDSP (stub), SLAVE
  • Mono-III, Mono-IV, Robocon: SCC68070, MCD212, CIAP (stub), IKAT

Only the Mono-I driver is capable of playing CD-i discs, since the DRVDSP and CIAP in later boards are not fully emulated. Certain software may softlock due to constant D-Pad movement polling by SLAVE (e.g. Zelda: Wand of Gamelon or CDi_BadApple).

Benchmarking

Time taken to process and render a single frame on:

  • Windows (x64, Nvidia + Intel i5-12400F): ~1.7ms (fullspeed)
  • Wii (vWii overclock): ~33.77ms (~29 fps)
  • Wii (normal): ~56.44ms (~18 fps)
  • Wii U (WUHB): ~58.51ms (~17 fps)
  • New 3DS: ~78.79ms (~13 fps)
  • Old 3DS: ~237ms (~4 fps)

All profiled times with the exception of the Windows version are longer than the minimum needed for throttling (16.667ms or 1/60 secs). All are compiled using the fastest compile optimizations available under GCC and are accurate as of commit 2e14ffa.

Screenshots

Player shell

CDI 200, CDI 220/20 (Mono-I) CDI 220/40 (Mono-II) CDI 490/00 (Mono-IV)

Gameplay

All captured under CDI 200 using Mono-I driver.

Hotel Mario Frog Feast Zelda: Wand of Gamelon

To-Do

Potential

  • Find faster 68010 emulator for ARM (3DS) + PowerPC? (Cyclone exists but may need to be modified to support 68010 derivative.)
  • Audio playback support for native homebrew libraries (i.e. non-SDL)
  • Emulate timekeeper on Mono-I/Mono-IV? (should handle NVRAM saving)
  • Fix PD on Mono-IV
  • Disc-related:
    • CDIC: Address slowdown when reading sectors (only noticeable on embedded platforms?)
    • CIAP: Read discs properly
  • LibRetro API compatibility?

Building

To compile, use devkitPro's powerpc-eabi-cmake (GC, (v)Wii, Wii U) or arm-none-eabi-cmake (3DS), or the regular MINGW64 CMake if compiling for Windows. The corresponding SDL2 package is required, except on 3DS.

The latest commit is compiled automatically using GitHub Actions (.github/workflows/*.yml).