The CD-i Emulator program provides a fairly complete emulation of the hardware of a CD-i player. The program is now available for download from the CD-i Emulator Home website. A limited edition is available for free, a small fee is required for the full version.

In order to actually run CD-i software, the emulator needs copies of the CD-i player ROMs. These ROMs are copyrighted and cannot be freely redistributed, but you can easily obtain them via the serial port of a physical CD-i player. For this you need a so-called CD-i Nullmodem Cable that will be available separately, or you can make your own.

At the current time only the ROMs from a subset of CD-i players are fully compatible with the emulator; this is being worked on and future player compatibility updates will be free. Full details are available from the abovementioned website.

A reasonably fast PC is needed to get acceptable performance; a Pentium 1.5 GHz is probably about minimal. If your hardware cannot keep up you will not be able to emulate in real-time and audio will skip unless you turn it off, but the emulator will still run and the CD-i sofware won't even know it isn't running at full speed.

The emulator does not currently support emulation of the Digital Video Cartridge, except for the extra memory it contains; for some CD-i software this is enough. This will be remedied in a future version.