CDI 910
The CDI 910, known outside the USA as the CDI 205, is a home media console developed by Philips and released on 1991-12-03. The console would hook up to a regular television and has native support for CD-i, audio CDs, photo CDs, CD+G (CD+Graphics), and Karaoke CDs. Over a dozen CD-i capable consoles were made, but, world wide, this was probably the best-selling. Although it was initially marketed for all sorts of home media, it was primarily used to play video games. It uses a Philips SCC68070 CPU clocked at 15.5 MHz.
Personal
A friend of mine had a CD-i console, I think this one, in the mid-1990s. I only played a single game, Mystic Midway: Rest in Pieces, and found it to be very unimpressive. Outside of that, I have only ever seen these consoles in the hands of retro collectors.
I don't own this console, and I've only ever played it once.
Review
Good
- It's nice that the console has so many features, the two most popular were playing video games and audio CDs.
Bad
- Despite having a powerful CPU, an enhanced Motorola 68000, the console lacked a decent graphic processor, so it could never produce high-quality graphics.
- The console only has a single controller port, so, until you also bought an adapter, simultaneous multi-player games were out of the question.
- The game controller was a repurposed Gravis GamePad, which was a mid-range controller.
- Of the additional features the console could perform, none were impressive. Playing karaoke CDs was quite nice, but few places sold them, and displaying photo and graphic CDs on a TV was every bit as fun as watching a family vacation slide show of strangers.
- CD-i format supports video playback, but the CDI 910 didn't have it built-in. Instead, you'd have to buy a special video decoder card tacking onto the already outrageous price.
Ugly
- The console was way too expensive for what it did. It hit the market for around $1,000! Instead of buying a CDI 910, you could buy a 5-disc CD player for about $250, an SNES for $200, and still have $550 left over for games and music.
- Like with all CD-i devices, it didn't have any impressive software. The bulk of the game library is absolute garbage and, by the time Philips's online service came out, a lot of consumers were already using services like Prodigy or America Online.
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