What is a CD-i Emulator?
A CD-i Emulator is a piece of hardware that contains a large harddisk and control circuitry to provide a stream of audio, video and program data to a CD-i authoring player in exactly the same way as if it was being read from a CD. The Emulator takes care of interleaving the data, creating the sector format and contiuning the feed of data according to the specification as laid down in the Green Book. When a CD-i Disc Image is being created, it can be read by the Emulator and played trough the CD-i authoring player for testing purposes. You need either to do this, or make a one-off on CD-R for testing, because you can’t test CD-i’s realtime behaviour at programming level (the audio, video and program data is not interleaved yet at that time). Since CD-R was just beginning to appear when this CD-i authoring hardware became available (early 90s), and a CD-R disc costed around US$ 50 a piece, a CD-i Emulator was a very economical solution for studios. Two versions of the Emulator were being
