Through the Digital Looking Glass

While exhaustively reverse-engineering the Serial Experiments Lain game, always in the back of my mind was an article I read years ago. It describes some curious connections between Lain, and another game called Alice In Cyber Land.
http://www.cjas.org/~leng/alice.htm

So naturally, once the Lain game hacking was thoroughly complete, my attention quickly turned to finding the secrets Alice held.

The work to discover the unique ways the game stored its videos really paid off. The Alice videos were all well animated, and suggested a game that could be a lot of fun. But for now I must be content with its raw Japanese clips, all of which can now be viewed on Youtube.

The Alice In Cyber Land franchise didn't stop with the game. It also included a soundtrack, and short OVA. It seems at least episode 1 was fansubbed by a group called "Boot To Da Head" back in 1997. The first episode is now watchable in very low quality, raw Japanese.

While the connections between Lain and Alice are intriguing, you might be interested to know that they don't end there. Tucked away in a corner of the internet is a little account by one of the game's creators that extends the connections to one more series: Digimon Tamers.
http://www.konaka.com/alice6/tamers/characters/juri-e.html

CD-i

I was pleasantly surprised when I found someone concocted a clever way of using jPSXdec to decode CD-i audio.

As explained in Jonathan Atkins's CDXA documentation, the Sony Playstation 1 and the Phillips CD-i both used the same audio format on their CDs. It never occurred to me that the CD-i likely has a retro community still following it, much like the Playstation 1 does.

This video describes a working solution to extracting CD-i audio with jPSXdec that will work with any game. However, after the extraction, you have to manually break up the audio clips and possibly adjust the speed of some.

Alternatively, you could do the job that jPSXdec can't yet do so the extracted audio clips don't need any extra editing.

If you let jPSXdec do its best to index the CD (or raw music file), it will find all the audio sectors, but fails to concatenate most of the contiguous streams. You're left with several thousand audio clips with a duration of 1 sector. It wouldn't be too difficult to write a script that checks the audio properties (channel, frequency, etc) and finds what sectors should be combined into a single audio clip. It even sounds like someone has already managed to make some headway with this.

Adding better CD-i audio handling to jPSXdec is quite easy, and will be included in the next release (whenever I can get this redesign finished). As for CD-i video, I can't say I have much motivation (or time) to figure it out. But if anyone wants to get their hands dirty and write some decoding code of their own, I'd be happy to support them however I can.