The Ill-Fated Philips CD-i Is Getting Its Own MiSTer FPGA Core 1
Image: Philips / Nintendo

The Philips CD-i was one of several attempts during the early '90s to fuse the worlds of multimedia and video games, and, outside of playing host to some unlikely Nintendo-themed titles, wasn't a tremendous commercial success.

As a result, there hasn't been a whole lot of desire to replicate the system using FPGA technology – until now, that is.

Developer Slamy has begun work on an FPGA core that will be playable on the MiSTer platform. At the moment, it's still at a very early stage, but given how quickly cores for the Saturn and N64 have evolved, we'd hope that it will mature fairly quickly.

Released in 1990, CD-i (Compact Disc Interactive) was jointly developed by Philips and Sony and was initially intended to be a new means of distributing video, music and other data – but it would be in the realm of video games where CD-i would be applied the most robustly.

When Sony's deal with Nintendo to create a CD-ROM drive for the SNES fell through, the former intended to work with Philips on a replacement, but it never happened; however, as part of the deal, Philips was permitted to use Nintendo IP in CD-i titles, which resulted in games such as Hotel Mario and Zelda: Faces of Evil.

[source x.com]