CDI 910

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The CDI 910 with its controller.

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.

I think a friend of mine had this console in the mid-1990s, but, outside of that, I have only ever seen these consoles in the hands of retro collectors.

Review

Good

  • It's nice that the console has so many features, the two most popular were playing video games and audio CDs.

Bad

  • The console only has a single controller port, so simultaneous multi-players games were out of the question.
  • The game controller was a repurposed Gravis GamePad, which wasn't a very good controller.
  • Most of the features the console could perform (playing photo CDs, Graphic CDs, and Karaoke CDs) were not very impressive.
  • 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.

Ugly

  • The console was way too expensive for what it did. It hit the market for around $1,000! At that time, the SNES, which had vastly superior games, was selling for under $200. And though the CDI 910 could boast many other multimedia features, most of them had little demand. Instead of buying a CDI 910, you could buy a CD player, a karaoke player, and an SNES and still be hundreds left over!
  • Like with all CD-i devices, there just wasn't ever anything that great made for it. The bulk of the game library is garbage and, by the time Philip's online service came out, a lot of consumers were already using services like Prodigy or America Online.

Links

Link-MobyGames.png  Link-Wikipedia.png