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I've already said that the language selection seems to be done in a manner that's sufficiently simple as to be able to be worked around. Anyway, as RB stated, the guy has 7 MCUs, so decapping one is not a problem if we can find someone who can reliably decap things.

Can games that require a digital video cartridge be emulated?

no, not until the patents expire, it's considered too much of a risk because the main MAME servers and lead dev are based in a country where software patent laws are very strict and well enforced.

(and MESS, by association, is MAME, because such code would have to be fed back up)

Thank you, that makes sense. Any idea when that will be?

I believe R.Belmont has more details on which exact ones apply to the MPEG encoding used there, so he'll probably fill in the details.

I imagine it could be quite a while tho, AFAIK we're only just looking at the audio ones expiring so that the Sega MPEG sound boards can be supported without risk.

You might have to look towards somebody doing it in a 3rd party build instead, where it wouldn't be the actual development team taking the risk. (There is nothing which would specifically prohibit this, it just wouldn't be integrated back until it was deemed 'safe' to do so)

The upshot is that the patent situation is bad in the US and potentially worse in Europe, where the relevant patents were often filed in a dozen countries on different dates.

That said, it is believed that MPEG-1 audio layers 1 & 2 and MPEG-1 video are free and clear in the US as of at least 2008. No lawyer or judge has made that determination however, and AudioMPEG Inc. claims their layer 3 (MP3) patents also cover layers 1 & 2 (although people who've implemented decoders say otherwise). No such claims have been made for MPEG-1 video.

So CD-i video cartridge decoding (and the Sega arcade MPEG audio board) is probably possible assuming nothing uses layer 3 audio, but it would ultimately be Aaron's decision as to if we want to take the risk.

-RB is not a lawyer and this is not legally binding advice, just what I understand from researching the subject.

Given that hundreds of commercial games ship with FMOD, and they say you can use MP2 without an additional license (but specifically state you need one from Thompson for MP3 which includes giving them royalty payments) I think there are potentially bigger targets than MAME if MP2 isn't 'safe' to be honest.

This is a commercial sound library, and they've dealt with the 'big players' in the audio playback market, so I think they know where things stand.

Of course, that's just as screwed up anyway, because the MP3 code is still in the binary, just not used :-p

All of what you're saying makes very little sense to me, I'm just grateful there are people in the world smart enough and willing to get their heads round these things!

Just for clarity, CD-i MPEG hardware does not support MPEG audio layer 3 (and neither does VideoCD). Both the Green and White book specify layers 1 and 2 only.

Just a bit of trivia and also bumping this thread in the hope of there being some news :-)

I now own the CDI 180/18x set displayed here and will shortly be dumping the ROMs.

The hardware is 2xVSC+VSR and CDIC but no 68HC05 CD or SLAVE processor so I'm pretty curious...