An experimental multiplatform Philips CD-i emulator written in C++17. (∩ ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)⊃━☆ﾟ. *
- 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.
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
The general code for this emulator is released under GPLv3 (see above credits for other licenses).
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.
| 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 |
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).
| 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.
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.
| 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 |
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).
| 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 |
The emulation settings can be configured in config.ini relative to the emulator's executable (e.g. .exe, .dol, .3dsx, etc).
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.
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).
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.
| CDI 200, CDI 220/20 (Mono-I) | CDI 220/40 (Mono-II) | CDI 490/00 (Mono-IV) |
|---|---|---|
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All captured under CDI 200 using Mono-I driver.
| Hotel Mario | Frog Feast | Zelda: Wand of Gamelon |
|---|---|---|
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- 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?
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).