Voyeur 03% -- the final USA Game to be Preserved

One of the larger differences I've noticed among collectors and preservationists is the amount of interest in code revisions. For example, largely collectors aren't concerned about a game revision as much as making sure they have 1-of-every-title on their shelves. Meanwhile, I've found revision hunting to be tricky, painful, but fundamental to preservation...

Above, just your average copy of Voyeur... or is it?

The TOSEC ISO Philips CD-i romset has been a great checklist for Redump's miss list. However, the TOSEC CD-i set is deeply flawed -- it has many bad dumps and VCDs and Photo CDs erroneously mixed in. Helpfully, when a revision was noticed in TOSEC, the mastering code was often included in the rom name as a differentiator. Over the past few months I've looked for data-side pictures to check listings of every copy of Voyeur that hit eBay, and messaging sellers to harass them for data side pictures to find the mythical "11220928 03" mastering code version in TOSEC until...

From on high... it has been found.

Needless to say I snapped up the Buy It Now copy. Now Voyeur USA has three known USA versions for CDi.. the first is a build with PVD 1993-09-07, the remaining both have PVD dates of 1993-09-15 - mastering code 11220928 01! and 11220928 03% (newly preserved).

So what's the big excitement about this new revision of Voyeur? Well the truth is the difference just appears to be a mastering difference. All the file dates are the same between the two 1993-09-15 versions, but I already knew that.

What can be said of finding this disc is that now the last known "Game" category title / revision has been dumped. It's a nice milestone for the preservation of USA CD-i titles to look at the USA miss list and not see a "Games" category at the top.

A couple German & Austrian titles roll in

A set of three Austrian Encyclopedias + a cathedral CD-i disc roll into the hallowed halls of redump courtesy of Blazers.

Additionally three German Photo CDs arrive in the same batch.

 

The Photo CDs are from the Philips Consumer Electronics Prasentiert series, a series released both in English and German variants. One day we hope to see the full sets of both the German and English variants from this series properly preserved.

From Akt Asthetik.

Loan #013

Furthering our conquest of the leader of the free world (America)'s undumped CD-i titles, Blazers dispatched a fresh package filled with goodies. First up, we have a big old batch of AIMS titles, which led to an interesting discovery.

Additionally, a categorical genocide has taken place on music related discs, with the vast majority of the remaining undumped music titles of USA being dumped this round:

And of course, the most fun is the extreme rares. Two "Engineering" titles (tech demos + retail title demos essentially) - one of which (Engineer 2.9) is a glass master. It's sad to say that the Titanic beta (gold disc) is unreadable, but that's the least exciting of the three titles anyway in my book:

A neat dental disc. All you orthodontists out there can't wait to get your latex gloves on this bad boy! 

The dumps have been added to the redump collection, and select scans are available at our archive.org account.

Thanks again to Blazers (praise be upon Him), our lord and savior of CD-i.

AIMS educational Alternate Versions

Among the latest batch Blazers has been kind enough to send my way for dumping, is a handful of the AIMS discs.

If you have a look below, you'll see the top disc is a little brighter yellow than the bottom one (more orange-ish). Additionally the top disc has a clear ring, whereas the bottom disc has a silver inner area:

 

These differentiations bring up some interesting questions. Blazers sent a single copy of each title, so I had to have a look in the redump database to compare an already existing dump of Animal Communities. My dump is here, a pre-existing dump is here. The dumps share the same PVD date and when using IsoBuster to browse the disc contents the dates on the root files look to be the same as well. Now notice the mastering codes of both entries - they're completely different. These clues point to the fact that at least Animal Communities received a second pressing - and possibly all the AIMS learning titles did. While in this instance the two different pressings have different hashes, this is likely due some mastering quirk - as may very well be the case with any other titles which were repressed.

On top - Blazers copy of Animal Communities with a "W.O." in the mastering code.

On bottom - Blazers copy of "The Civil War: Four Years..." with the serial number (as printed on the disc label) in the mastering code.

The good news about these Alternate versions is that you can identify which is undumped by the color of the disc label and the inner hole back area (clear vs silver) if you're browsing ebay for pictures.

Demonstration Discs had Revisions too

 Demonstration Discs - particularly white label ones from USA - tend to match retail builds of the titles. However, it's not uncommon to discover a pre-release beta build among them. For me, this has made the particularly interesting to hunt down and dump (although it's a process I wish I started on earlier as they have become scarcer these past few years).

Demonstration Discs are not "demo" discs, rather they're full game promos. Commonly promos are given to press to review games - often before release. If a bug is identified before the retail pressing begins, an update will be issued when the game comes out in retail. However, sometimes an update is issued while still in promo phase. So far with CDi, this has been a rare occurrence (at least as far as the data I've collected shows). Dragon's Lair II and Classical Jukebox are the only two examples I've found where a game promo was pressed twice (each time with a different code revision).

Both builds of the Classical Jukebox white label Demonstration Disc have the exact same disc label.

The retail build matching Demonstration Disc dump.

And the pre-retail build.

While different mastering codes don't always mean the build is different, they often do. In this case - they are different. The pre-retail build's PVD is earlier by about 20 days.

Continuing to collect data on these Demonstration Discs is important to ensure all the various builds of CD-i discs are dumped. I encourage anyone with a collection of these kind of discs who's interested in sharing data (scans / mastering codes) to reach out to me.