I’ve seen a bunch of recent videos on CD-i and I was wondering whether the same engineers worked on it and DCC or entirely separated in some way or another?
When I worked for Philips in Hasselt, Belgium in 1996, there were some engineers there who had worked on the development of DCC. Also, for my project in Hasselt, I used hardware (non-volatile memory modules) that had previously been used to debug CD-i players. But for all the projects at Philips, there was never a time when engineers worked in two or more teams at once. But even though I don’t have any definite information, it’s highly likely that a lot of engineers worked on one project first, then on another.
Something else that I know for sure is that in 1995 Philips had a traveling exposition of all the three new technologies that they had recently developed: DCC, CD-i and wide-screen TV. All those technologies came out around the same time, and I suspect that nobody was working on two or more projects at the same time. That wouldn’t have made sense.
It’s possible that there was some cooperation internally within Philips via other teams. For example I know Philips had an “MPEG competence center” at the Strijp S complex, and I went there a few times to pick up and drop off equipment (such as a QAM modulator and a CD-R with an MPEG transport stream file) that we could use in Hasselt to debug the MPEG demultiplexer chip and firmware. It’s almost certain that the MPEG-CC was involved with both DCC (because PASC=MP1) as well as CD-i (because full-motion video used MPEG1 video and MP1 audio). And of course there must have been other cooperation e.g. with Philips Semiconductors and Philips Key Modules.
===Jac
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