The 16-bit CD-ROM based system was not promoted as a gaming platform. In advertising, Phillips highlighted the multimedia applications that the CD-i would be able to perform. Dutch electronics giant Philips, begins to introduce its Compact Disc Interactive (CD-i) technology to industrial users before marketing it as an entertainment system for consumers. It is based on CD-ROM ('Read Only Memory') technology which stores and reads information in the same way as a compact disc. CD-i systems can play audio discs and films as well as numerous other publications from computer games to illustrated encyclopaedias.



Philips sold various professional CD-i players next to the standard consumer models. Both types of players comply fully to the CD-i standard as defined in the Green Book and were based on the same CPU and audio and video ICs, but the professional players usually offered some extra features. There were professional players with an integrated floppy disk drive, parallel ports to connect a printer or ZIP-drive, SCSI-ports, Ethernet network connections or with up to 5 MB of extra RAM. Some players had a feature that enabled the users to customise the start-up screen of the player shell. Several professional players were especially made for CD-i development studios since they included input ports to connect an emulator to simulate the playback of a CD-i disc from an external hard disk for testing purposes.



Although there were various models of CD-i players, every CD-i disc performed exactly the same in terms of system speed or audio and video quality on every CD-i system. The Green Book extensively specifies how and at what speed the audio and video data should be read from the disc and parsed trough the appropriate decoding ICs. Even if a faster CPU was used in a CD-i player (which is allowed by the Green Book, but never implemented in any CD-i player) system performance would only rise slightly because the real-time retrieval of audio and video from a disc is not influenced by the processor.

