No it's not copy protection, but an attempt at "improved" compatibility with audio cd players. Although it seems to have had that effect You can create CD-i Ready images with CloneCD, not sure about cdrdao.

CD-i Ready is really a PITA, also for the developers (it used to be impossible to burn them, not sure if this still holds). So you had to use a "normal" CD-i disc image for all testing, and then just before mastering you had to re-do the image in CD-i Ready format. This caused all the audio track numbers to shift by one...

Exactly; CD-i Emulator has even more controls:


It also shows the player type and disc name in the title bar. You can turn all of this off, though.

I'm guessing that it's a CD-i Bridge disc, intended to also play on other platforms beside CD-i. Can't remember having heard the term before, though.

I see you're still forcing audio buffers for direct audio playback; I guess it works with Hotel Mario for you. Any idea why it doesn't in CD-i Emulator (you've seen my code)? I've been staring at it for a few hours and I don't get it...

What you want is not a second bitmap display like PC10, but a segmented LED/LCD output like e.g. turbo.c in MAME (screenshot) or mk2.c in MESS. I'm not sure if rendlay.c supports digits with the appropriate number of segments for the CD-I display but it shouldn't be that hard to add if not.

Except that doing it my way gets what Carlos really wants (the CD-i image filling his screen) and is more flexible.

Also, nobody understands how to author those fricking layouts.

It wasn't meant to be hard....

Anyway, best example to look at for screen + LCD is the nbmj8688.c driver, which has 2 LCD's (one for each player) in addition to the screen.

I'll see what I can come up with.

Here's a strange request... could you make me a custom build of wcdiemu.exe that has the audio forcing enabled, so that I can check a trace from that build against MESS's error log? If you're not comfortable with that, the full .out trace from such a build would also work. Everything in the trace should be off, except for the following options:

et fun cdic
et dev cdic
et aud
et sec
et dis

Download link is in your mail; meanwhile I'll continue staring for a bit more

I miss the LCD