The Philips CD-i (Compact Disc Interactive) is an interactive multimedia CD player developed and marketed by Royal Philips Electronics N.V. This category of device was created to provide more functionality than an audio CD player or game console, but at a lower price than a personal computer with a CD-ROM drive at the time. The cost savings were due to the lack of a hard drive, floppy drive, keyboard, mouse, monitor (a standard television was used), and less operating system software.

The CD-i player 400 series, which includes the 450, 470, 490 models. The 400 models are slimmed-down units aimed at console and educational markets. The CD-i 450 player, for instance, is a budget model designed to compete with game consoles. In this version, an infrared remote controller is not standard.

The CDi 490 is a good model to own, as it has the Digital Video Cartridge built in, it is a slightly more enhanced version of the CDi 470, aimed more at he institutional end of the market, the machine has 32KB of internal ROM.

CD-i also refers to the multimedia Compact Disc standard used by the CD-i console, also known as Green Book, which was developed by Philips and Sony (not to be confused with MMCD, the pre-DVD format also co-developed by Philips and Sony). Work on the CD-i began in 1984 and it was first publicly announced in 1986.[2] The first Philips CD-i player, released in 1991 and initially priced around USD $700,[3] is capable of playing interactive CD-i discs, Audio CDs, CD+G (CD+Graphics), Karaoke CDs, and Video CDs (VCDs), though the last requires an optional "Digital Video Card" to provide MPEG-1 decoding. The CD-i proved to be a commercial failure in that market segment and some of its games have claimed to be among the worst games ever made. Though this is an unfair assessment, as at the time of release the games were often well received by the press. Philips ceased publishing video games for the platform in 1998.

The model number is CDi 490/00. It was made in Belgium and has a production number of AH019828010012.

Manufacturer: Philips
Date: 1997

This exhibit has a reference ID of CH54685. Please quote this reference ID in any communication with the Centre for Computing History.