Weighing in at a cool 7 gigabytes, this new Cinepak Movie Disc release of PandaMonium Reviews’ massive, nearly eight-hour “Digging for ISIX – A Digital Pictures History” documentary was quietly dropped on Bluesky over the weekend. Spanning 12 discs and utilizing the open-source tool Cinepak Movie Disc 1.0 by TrekkiesUnite118, this is both the longest video produced by SHIRO!’s own Nick “PandaMonium” Broadway and my girthiest Cinepak release yet. These discs do not require a VCD or “Movie Card” to play, and are compatible with most emulators, optical drive emulators and the MiSTER FPGA.
Savvy viewers may have noticed that this is the first PandaMonium video to be edited and uploaded in a 4:3 aspect ratio. This was great fun for someone like me, who will take any excuse to watch YouTube on a CRT television. After downscaling my PC output to 480i, I felt like I was enjoying this documentary and all of the fantastic original footage in the way it was intended. Of course, this means it’s also perfectly suited to displaying on a Saturn!
Capture of VGA output from a PC through an Analog Way Studio Scan Converter, displayed on a Sony PVM 20L5 CRT monitor. Previous releases were 16:9 aspect, which appears letterboxed on 4:3 displays. PandaMonium said, “I was getting sick of constantly dealing with my source material not fitting the modern day standard 16:9, so I did standard def the whole way.“
Those familiar with previous Cinepak movie disc releases will understand the functionality: A title screen with music appears with instructions to “PRESS START” to begin playing the video clips. L and R buttons navigate forward and back between clips, while X restarts the current clip and Z pauses. Each clip has a “Part” and “Chapter” number visible at the start to help you return to where you may have left off previously. When you reach the end of a disc a message to “insert next disc” appears, which is your cue to restart the system and load the next disc.
A view of the title screen that appears before the start of the first video clip on each disc. CPK Player created by TrekkiesUnite118. Graphics and editing by Shadowmask.
Editing the entire documentary down to seven-minute clips, near the maximum allowed by CPK Movie Disc 1.0, took a few days of solid work using VirtualDub2. An effort was made to create tasteful cuts between scenes to preserve the flow of the original video as much as possible.
Thankfully once the editing was complete, the individual clips could all be exported with a single batch process. Once converted from Cinepak-encoded .mov files to FILM-format .cpk, the clips were ready to be built using the provided batch script with Movie Tools. The opening audio track was taken from the video and converted to .aif format, and a custom 320×240 bitmap title screen was created in photoshop. Users who make it to the end of Disc 12 will be rewarded with a unique ending credits video, unedited interview footage and Japanese promotional videos for some Digital Pictures games.
Notes:
- Self-booting video discs made with Cinepak Movie Tools 1.0 by TrekkiesUnite118.
- Fullscreen 320×240 video source with 22khz 16bit audio downscaled from original source video. (Courtesy of PandaMonium Reviews.)
- Bonus unedited clips from the Digital Pictures offices.
- Bonus Digital Pictures video advertisements.
Google Drive links:
ODEs: Digging for Isix – A Digital Pictures History_ODE.zip
MiSTer/emulators: Digging for Isix – A Digital Pictures History_MiSTer_Emu.zip
Two versions are provided because of compatibility issues experienced during testing. The only difference is that the .cue files have been removed from the ODE version. If you’re not sure which one to download, grab the MiSTer/emulator version and remove the .cue files in each “Disc ##” folder if you experience issues loading.
- Stock Fenrir firmware will not load these images, so Fenrir users are encouraged to install Fenrir Loader Kai along with the ODE version: PPCenter :: Pseudo Saturn Kai.
- Satiator tested working with either version.
- SAROO, MODE, Rhea and Phoebe ODEs have not been tested. Please post a comment if you’ve tested this working on these.
- Emulators may require .cue files (Mednafen).
- Burning discs is not recommended as some disc images exceed 700MB.
Do you enjoy these movie discs? What video would you like to see turned into one? Tell us about it below!
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