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.
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:
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.
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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).
pAlcohol / Alcohol Portable is a disc mounting software which has use for mounting multi-bin dumps properly on Windows. While Alcohol Soft is better known for their paid flagship software Alcohol 120% - Portable Alcohol is freeware.
After launching the app - just drag and drop the cue file into the top half of the app, and the disc will be mounted (as seen below):
The disc is now virtually mounted and you can use finder / or other apps to explore the disc as a whole.
As an example, here's one use case: For VCDs, in VLC you can "Media" -> "Open Disc" -> Select "SVCD/VCD" and navigate to your "Disc device" which would be the drive letter of your mounted VCD disc. Now your movie will properly playback.
When you're done noodling, in Alcohol Portable, unmount your disc image:
A new batch has arrived from the gentleman Blazers. This batch is a little different from the rare-title-wowsers! in the past. While the CD-i preservation community has done a hell of a job dumping super rare discs lately, we wanted to go back to the basics for this batch and dump some of the missing fundamentals from the US region.
A perfectly boring batch, and that's a good thing...
Nobelia is a promising title released by developer TwBurn - self described as "Zelda meets Bomberman". Many of us have been watching the progress of this game unfold on the Philips CD-i Community Discord and are excited that it's official release is upon us!
Interestingly, the game is including the source code on the disc, which should be a fun treat for all you tinkerers out there - and acts to create a physical record of preservation.
Ordering is available worldwide, shipping from Europe and North America.