czei@accelerator.eng.ohio-state.edu (Michael S. Czeiszperger) (05/07/88)
[This contains somewhat interesting stuff about the latest development] [in home entertainment. Please forgive the somewhat boring intro ] I got a call this week from a CD-I developer, who claimed he got my number from a friend who reads USENET. He was all excited about telling me the latest happenings with CD-I, except he thought us USENET chaps didn't know anything about CD-I and proceded to run down the entire last two years of CD-I history. After I got it through his head that the green book standards and the formulation of American Interactive Media were by now well-known events, he managed to explain who he was and why he was calling. I think his last name was Feldman, although I'm not sure because he talked so fast. He claimed to be an employee of the company that makes the computer games "Deja Vu" and "The Univited", and that he was *at this very minute* working on CD-I versions of these games. He went on to claim that there were about a hundred companies working on CD-I titles, and that most of the titles weren't games, but a new kind of entertainment. For instance, there is one disk that is a home audio mixing session. The CD-I disk contains the raw tracks from a well known rock group's recording session, and the home user gets to mix down and arrange the tune any way they like. It was mentioned in Keyboard magazine that some of the high end players will include MIDI outputs, so the home recording enthusiast could use his home recording setup. Theoretically one could record the MIDI output from the CD-I disk directly into a MIDI sequencer and then re-arrange the whole tune, or examine how all the licks were put together. A written score of the album could even be generated from the MIDI output, so the hobby musician could have an *exact* musical notation of the original music, not the cheesy version featured in those books. One thing we talked about was the present mis-conception about the possibilities of interactive entertainment. Some people are unable to comprehend anything interactive that doesn't function like the Dragon laserdisc game that was out a couple of years back. In that game, the user could only decide between left, right, and straight, and the game just jumped between tracks on the laserdisk. This way of operating is not in any way representative of CD-I, or of interactive media in general. For instance, the CD-I version of Dark Castle will function *exactly like the regular Dark Castle*, except for a bunch of added features. For another thing, it will be in full color, and the audio will feature longer, more complicated, better recorded sound effects. Beyond that, it will be try to be more than just a computer game. If the user just wishes to watch, for instance, Dark Castle will cease to be a game, and will become more like a movie, presenting a story with dialog, characters, and a plot that takes place on the backgrounds of the game. As you can imagine, THIS IS NOT ANYTHING LIKE DRAGON'S LAIR. Not one bit. About the players themselves..... The manufacturers of CD-I players have pledged to make the first units cost under $1000. There are rumors that base units with no extra features could initially cost as low as $750. Philips is getting ready right now for CD-I by including a CD-I port on all of their regular CD Audio players. If you've purchased a Philips CD player in the last two months it probably has this port. When CD-I finally hits in about a year, Philips will sell a cheap expansion box that contains the heart of the CD-I system. The basic units will come with: 1. The ability to play regular CD audio disks. 2. A video output to hook up to your TV. 3. A joystick. One of the problems with using CD's as a storage media is that it's impossible to write on the darn things. How are people going to store data such as their highest Dark Castle scores? The players themselves will have 16k of battery backed memory, that should take care of a small amount of data. An alternative is to include an extra video output so that the player could record the data directly to videotape. Assumming that the kind of people that would by CD-I players are the same kind of appliance happy people that buy VCR's, this should a workable solution. :-) Just bringing the USENET community the latest news..... -czei -- Michael S. Czeiszperger | "The only good composer is a dead composer" Systems Analyst | Snail: 2015 Neil Avenue (614) The Ohio State University | Columbus, OH 43210 292- cbosgd!osu-cis!accelerator.eng.ohio-state.edu!czei 0161