A while back, Steep Haywire did us a great service by dumping a handful of his rare discs. Additionally he provided a large batch of photos of his collection which serve as excellent documentation.
The below collection of discs is largely undumped.
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Thanks to Steep Haywire for sharing these photos of his collection. They are likely the final batch of pics documenting his amazing collection we are to see.
At some point not too-too long ago comparatively to the history of the universe, I stumbled upon an ambiguously titled CD format "AudioVision CD" ("AVCD"). If you were to guess that AudioVision CD format was just branding for "Enhanced CD", "CD Plus", yadda yadda then you'd be wrong.
AudioVision CD (AVCD) format, much like CD-i Ready stores data in the Track 01 pregap (IsoBuster will display this as "Track 00"). Also like CD-i Ready, as a result of the data portion of Track 01 being glued to the Redbook Audio portion of Track 01, the data portion is scrambled upon dumping (as Redbook Audio shouldn't be descrambled). This quirk makes both types of discs annoying to deal with as dumped data.
One potential solution would be to split Track 01 at the Pregap, descramble the first part of the track (the data), and push the rest of the track (the Redbook Audio portion) to Track 02, then make Track 02 into Track 03, and so on so there would be one extra Track declared in the cue (with an extra .bin to match).
It's probably no surprise to hear that Philips developed the AudioVision CD format. A press release announces two early releases of the format ("worm" by 2 Minutes Hate and a self-titled release by Techno Squid Eats Parliament - both released in 1994).
Two record labels which seemed to champion the format (releasing multiple titles employing the technology) are Ardent Records and Christian label Forefront. Forefront liked the format so much that they erroneously included the AudioVision CD logo up until at least the 1998 release of Big Tent Revival's "Amplifier" album, which was actually an Enhanced Music CD (Blue book / multisession).
Discogs.com recognizes the format, and you can see all the discs which are currently logged as AVCD with their format filter. However, proceed with caution as "AVCD" seems to be a buzzword in Asia that refers to music CDs which come packed with VCDs as "AVCD" editions - and most of the discogs entries for AVCD are not AVCD format at all. Look for the "AudioVision CD" logo on the artwork, and the titles should be released in the mid 1990s.
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...
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 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).
