Are there still former CD-i programmers out there reading this ?

David Oseas

2004-02-24 08:32:16 UTC

Post by Peter
Hi,
I was wondering if the CD-i *.RTF files contain a header which is defined so
that I can list the individual records ?
It would be nice to be able to treat an RTF file as a directory and list all
the different records as files. This way individual pictures etc. could be
"rescued".
I have been looking in greenbook but all I could find was what the CD-i app
needs to pass to the CDFM (the PCB).
Maybe I missed something ? Or did every CD-i app "know" excatly what
resources were where in the RTF file and was the approach entirely app
dependant (and not generic) ?
The little interest in this newsgroup taken in account I realise that it may
be a while before someone reads this. So if a follow up is posted, please
also send me an email to trigger me.
Peter
www.isobuster.com

Short answer: No.

Longer answer: depends on what you mean by "RTF file". If you're talking
about the RealTimeFile as it exists in a disc image, then there is no
standard index within the file. Usually during the build of an RTF, a data
file was produced that mapped "asset" labels to locations in the RTF file.
The map was loaded from a "Yellow" sector (ie, Form 1) data file by the
application, in order to determine where to find the "asset" in the RTF.
However, the format of the map was entirely tool & application specific,
athough there were only a few different playmanagers used and a few
different tools to build RTFs.

Ken Ellinwood wrote a program called "DA" (disc analyzer) which was capable
of recovering individual assets from an RTF, but I seem to recall that you
needed some knowledge of the layout of the assets in order to recover them.
I'll contact you privately about getting a copy to you, if you are
interested.

RTF files in the premastered format were usually IFF files and, depending on
which build tool created them, contained only an index to the assets, or the
index + the assets. It should be possible to parse the IFF headers of one
of the index + assets type RTFs to get at the assets. However, you won't
find one of these beasts on a CD-i disc; only on a tape backup of the input
files for building a disc. Off the top of my head, I can't recall which
tool (Green, dbl, or ??) produced this flavor of RTF.

Of course, all of this is from my admittedly rusty memory, and, since it's
been about 8 years since I mastered my last CD-i disc, may not be entirely
accurate. I'll have to go back through my notes & see if I missed anything.

-David (Former Philips CD-i/CD-ROM/MPEG/PhotoCD/VideoCD Software Engineer)