Index of the Philips CD-i disc documentation — 8 titles, one repository each, plus the shared platform checklist they all feed into.
Green Book discs opened from the pre-file-system region up: sector layouts, OS-9/68000 module validation, coding bytes, DYUV, real-time interleave and the symbol tables that survived mastering. No repository here contains disc images or game assets — only measurements and the code to reproduce them.
| Shared platform findings | cdi-platformnotes-doc — the canonical checklist all 8 discs feed into |
| Disc-by-disc comparison | section 10, Baselines — it lives there and is not copied here, so there is only ever one of it |
Listed in the order they were documented. The Saga column is filled in where the title belongs to a series that may one day earn its own index; it is empty where it does not.
| Title | Year | Studio | Saga | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ultra CD-i Soccer | 1997 | Krisalis / Philips Interactive Media | A Green Book disc 2.4 % full that compresses nothing, with 10 % of its file system shipped as empty files | |
| Origami | 1993 | EagleVision interactive productions | The opposite end of the format: a disc 98 % full in which 52 sectors out of 326,400 are the file system and the program | |
| Link: The Faces of Evil | 1993 | Animation Magic / Philips Interactive Media | Zelda | The retail build still carries 325 C function names, handing over the architecture of a game whose source was never public |
| Merlin's Apprentice | 1995 | Philips Interactive Media of America | Cliff Johnson's only CD-i game, pressed with the linker's symbol file still on it: 887 named symbols nobody references | |
| The Apprentice | 1994 | The Vision Factory / Philips | The CD-i's best action game, and a CD-i Ready disc: the whole thing hides in the 69,150-sector pregap of track 1 | |
| Laser Lords | 1992 * | Spinnaker Software Corp. and American Interactive Media, Inc. ** | The oldest CD-i disc measured here, and the one that moves the shared head-region recording back a year: ten jukebox streams carrying 6 h 34 m of speech | |
| A Visit to Sesame Street — Letters | 1991 *** | American Interactive Media **** | The oldest disc measured here: 13,138 DYUV frames of alphabet cartoons decoded at 172 × 108, and a publisher bumper byte-identical to a disc eleven months younger | |
| Burn:Cycle | 1995 ***** | Trip Media and Philips Media ****** | ******* | A film with a program inside it: 7 directory entries, 99.23 % of the volume in one real-time file, a 69-minute RL7 picture at 384 × 240 and 12.5 fps, and 77:49 of ADPCM the pressing tags as video |
* Laser Lords, Year. The volume descriptor's creation field at offset 813
reads 1992083119164000 and its modification field at 830 reads
1992090914254400, so the volume was laid out on 1992-08-31 and cut on
1992-09-09. The directory records run back to 1991-08-13, and the two
oldest files are the publisher's bumper player and its data module. The cell says 1992
because that is when the disc was made; 1991 is when two of its components
were.
** Laser Lords, Studio. The descriptor's publisher field at offset 318 says
Philips Interactive Media of America. The studio is not in a descriptor field:
it is in /COPYRIGHT, 425 bytes at LBA 2,271, which reads
Copyright (c) 1992 Spinnaker Software Corp. and American Interactive Media, Inc., and the same 104-byte string is inside the executable at
cdi_launcher+0x28a. Two places, one wording.
*** A Visit to Sesame Street — Letters, Year. The volume descriptor's
creation field at offset 813 reads 1991091316023100 and its modification
field at 830 reads 1991091411185600, so the volume was laid out on
1991-09-13 at 16:02:31 and re-cut nineteen hours later, after the executable
was rebuilt overnight. The directory records run back to 1991-08-26, and
the two oldest files are the hot-spot table and the publisher's bumper player.
The cell says 1991 because both dates do.
**** A Visit to Sesame Street — Letters, Studio. The descriptor's
publisher field at offset 318 says American Interactive Media, and that is
the only attribution the disc makes: there is no COPYRIGHT, no ABSTRACT
and no BIBLIOGRAPHY — all three name fields are 32 spaces — and the string
Philips does not occur in any of the 673,448,160 bytes of the image. External
sources give the publisher as Philips Media and the developer as Children's
Television Workshop; the disc confirms neither and the conflict is recorded
rather than resolved in
chapter 01.
What the disc does confirm about CTW is a picture: a 384 × 240 CLUT7 still
inside both bumper streams reading CHILDREN'S TELEVISION WORKSHOP. The
Saga cell is empty on purpose. An external source names a companion title,
Numbers (1991), in the same A Visit to Sesame Street series; that disc has
not been measured here, and a saga of one is not a saga.
***** Burn:Cycle, Year. All three date fields of the volume descriptor —
creation at offset 813, modification at 830 and effective at 864 — read
1995052418395600, the same second: 1995-05-24 at 18:39:56. That is the
first disc in this collection where all three agree, and it is a fact about the
authoring tool rather than the schedule. The directory records disagree with it
in one direction only: /BurnCycle.rtr is stamped 45 minutes earlier at
17:54:37, and the three text files are from 1994 — copyright.txt
1994-03-31, bibliographic.txt 1994-08-30, abstract.txt 1994-08-31 — with
copyright.txt reading, in its entirety, (c) Trip Media 1994. The cell says
1995 because that is when the disc was made; external catalogues say 1994
because that is what the copyright line says, and both are right about different
things.
****** Burn:Cycle, Studio. Two places on the disc name it and for
the first time in this collection they corroborate each other. The descriptor's
publisher field at offset 318 says Trip Media; /bibliographic.txt, 3,902
bytes at LBA 2,273, opens Burn:Cycle / From Trip Media and Philips Media. The
data-preparer field at offset 446 says Graham Deane, and the same credit roll
names him twice — Graham Deane — Runtime and Production Software and
Graham Deane — Technical Director — which is the first time a preparer field
here has been confirmed by the disc's own credits. That roll is 113 name-shaped
strings, about 98 of them people, and it is the largest in the collection by a
factor of three.
******* Burn:Cycle, Saga. Empty on purpose, and the filename is why it
had to be checked. The dump is called Burn-Cycle (Italy) (Il Gioco) — the
game — which reads like a disc designation distinguishing one disc of a set
from another. It is not: external sources give the Italian box line as "Il Gioco
che ti Manda Fuori", so (Il Gioco) is a fragment of an advertising slogan.
A companion object does exist and it is a Red Book soundtrack album — Discogs
catalogues Simon Boswell and Chris Whitten — Burn:Cycle as a CDi + CD pairing,
and the Italian release shipped in two configurations, with and without it. An
audio CD is not a second title, so a saga of one is not a saga.
Each entry below is the write-up that used to sit in the
Game and engine documentation table of the profile
README, moved here verbatim. Nothing was
rewritten or summarised in the move: same prose, same numbers, same links. The
only change is that a \| written to escape a pipe inside a table cell is now
a plain |, because these are no longer table cells.
Ultra CD-i Soccer (Krisalis / Philips Interactive Media, 1997) — a Green Book disc 2.4 % full that compresses nothing, with 10 % of its file system shipped as empty files: three abandoned localisations, palettes real and pictures never drawn. The executable asks for a Sega logo nobody pressed, and the studio put itself in the team database
Origami (EagleVision interactive productions, 1993) — the opposite end of the CD-i format: a disc 98 % full in which 52 sectors out of 326,400 are the file system and the program. Catalogued (En,Fr,De,Nl), it carries five narration languages — the fifth is Japanese — and stores every photograph twice, one per video standard, so 21.7 % of the pressing is video your player never reads
Link: The Faces of Evil (Animation Magic / Philips Interactive Media, 1993) — the retail build still carries 325 C function names, handing over the architecture of a game whose source was never public. Half the 600 MB disc is deliberately empty, eight stereo music channels run in parallel so switching tunes costs no seek, and each playfield ships two dozen compiled 68000 subroutines
Merlin's Apprentice (Philips Interactive Media of America, 1995) — Cliff Johnson's only CD-i game, pressed with the linker's symbol file still on it: 19,752 bytes nobody references, holding 887 named symbols that give up eight puzzle engines and all 27 puzzles by name, a cheat flag, and a streaming scheduler the error strings call the Traffic Cop. The BOLT asset container is mapped to the byte — 129 groups, 7,703 members, zero chain breaks — and its compressor turns out to manage 1.17:1
The Apprentice (The Vision Factory / Philips, 1994) — the CD-i's best action game, and a CD-i Ready disc: the whole thing hides in the 69,150-sector pregap of track 1, so every ripper reads it as audio and hands it back scrambled. It ships the linker's symbol table (521 named symbols), a 68000 disassembler switched on by a file in the player's NVRAM, and a default high-score table naming twenty people where the credits name three. The soundtrack is pressed twice — 22 Red Book tracks and 22 ADPCM channels, mapped one-to-one, 21 of 22 durations agreeing to a quarter-second — and 714 KB of the Philips bumper is byte-identical to Link's
Laser Lords (Spinnaker Software Corp. and American Interactive Media, Inc., published by Philips Interactive Media of America, 1992) — the oldest CD-i disc in this collection by a full year, and the one that rewrites the strongest result the CD-i pipelines had. The 5,229,000-byte recording in front of the file system, known on three discs of 1993–95, is byte-identical here on a volume cut 1992-08-31 — and so are 2,269 of the first 2,270 sectors of the pressing, the only difference being the volume descriptor itself. Ten of its twenty-two real-time files are jukeboxes of fourteen to sixteen parallel speech channels descending from channel 15, so 6 h 34 m of dialogue are permanently in front of the head and switching speaker costs no seek. It carries the first Level A audio in the collection — eleven seconds of it, in the publisher's logo, pressed twice for NTSC and PAL with byte-identical soundtracks — 95 DYUV stills proved to the byte at 384 × 240, a sixteen-slot table naming real-time files that were never pressed, and 64,629 sectors of a video coding the Green Book does not define. This session also gave the CD-i branch its first six sha1-all.txt lists, 324 records, and the finding that a file-level hash list is blind to both kinds of sharing this platform actually does
A Visit to Sesame Street — Letters (American Interactive Media, USA, September 1991) — the oldest disc in this collection by eleven and a half months, and the first one made for people who cannot read: no text file of any kind, no symbol table, no printf, and two human names in a mastering field as the only credit anywhere. Four painted rooms of Sesame Street, 640 pixels wide and seen through a 384-pixel window, with a 20 KB hot-spot table whose coordinates are half-pixels — proved by drawing thirteen of its rectangles over the street and landing on the letterbox, the bird and the trash can. 13,138 DYUV frames at 172 × 108 and 8 fps decoded, every one aligned, in 32 animated alphabet cartoons; the eight-sector frame slot is proved by the fact that all 31 interruptions of the video channel's sector run fall between frames. The publisher's two bumper streams are byte-identical to Laser Lords' eleven and a half months later — eight streams, 2,246,756 bytes, invisible to every file-level hash list because the two files differ — and inside them is the one place the disc spells out its own abbreviation, as a drawing. The executable it replaced overnight on 1991-09-14 is still on the pressing, in 41 sectors the file system no longer points at, and the 5.2 MB recording in front of the file system gets eleven months older: five discs of seven, 1991 to 1995
Burn:Cycle (Trip Media / Philips Media, UK, May 1995) — a film with a program inside it, and the first object in this collection that arrived as a CHD rather than an image. Seven directory entries, no directories, and 99.23 % of the volume space in one real-time file: sixty-nine minutes and fifty-six seconds of disc carrying a picture, its soundtrack and the game's own logic past the head at 1×, with 0.68 % padding — thirty-five times lower than anything else here. The film decodes: RL7 at 384 × 240, 55,368 frames at 12.5 fps, 99.977 % of 13,301,593 lines ending exactly on the boundary, and the geometry proved four ways — the bit-7 disproof of the CLUT7 the coding byte claims, the exact-line-end count saturating at 384, vertical autocorrelation at 240, and the TRIGGER submode bit turning out to be the frame clock, one per frame, matching the frame count exactly on 857 of 1,025 records. The census says zero audio sectors on a disc with a famous Simon Boswell soundtrack, and the census is right and completely misleading: 21,888 sectors carry Green Book ADPCM with the VIDEO type bit set, found by running section 8's sound-group structure test over every stream rather than only over the ones the type bits call audio — 77 minutes and 49 seconds of it. The game ships as 353 named, compiled 68000 script objects interleaved with the film they belong to, one per viewpoint, which is why a 92,880-byte module runs a two-hour game; the linker's symbol table is still on the pressing, 633 symbols in three tables whose headers bind each to its module by CRC-24, and it names the whole engine — a stream manager, a video manager that writes the MCD212's control tables by name, and 164 script opcodes behind a dispatch. And the box says Italian: twenty-two strings in thirty-four places say so too, in two encodings, four of them a dirty-disc panic screen stored bottom-line-first inside the executable and eighteen inside the stream — where nobody had looked, because the search had been for the word italiano rather than for the language