A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

TL;DR in advance: Large areas of flat shading can be streamed off the disk faster. The baseline CD-i player spec, ironically, did not support the sort of full-motion video that comes to mind when we think of the "multimedia" heyday of the early 90's.

MPEG decompression was simply not supported unless you had a Digital Video Cartridge, or had a model from pretty far into the console's life cycle, when manufacturers would sometimes integrate DVC compatibility into the console itself.

The standard video hardware of the CD-i was an odd thing: One of the video modes (and the only way to break out of palettized color) was "delta YUV", where you'd specify the starting values in YUV color space, then each following sample was a delta against the current value.

This was what a handful of games used to play FMVs within a small, limited on-screen window, since it provided enough color fidelity to be worthwhile.

Beyond that, it's important to keep in mind that the baseline CD-i spec was sporting a 1x-speed CD: The best you could get, assuming continuous transfer with no seeking, was 150 kilobytes a second coming off of the disc.

Given that a full frame of 320x240 pixels at 16-bit color resolution is exactly 150 kilobytes, that would seem to mean that the best you could hope for is a "video" running at one frame per second. That's not a video, that's a slide-show. So, how do we solve it?

Well, the Apple IIgs had a prescient aspect of its own video hardware: It supported run-length encoding (RLE) for graphics. The CD-i spec called for video hardware that could do RLE, too. In English: RLE is a value and a repeat count. "Blue, 25 times" instead of "blue blue bl...