Almost....

"The Story of Jonah (Interlight Children's Bible Stories) - Test footage" (Watch on YouTube)

everestdragon happens to be visiting me for a couple days. Among the other things we've been up to, he took an interest in my ongoing Interlight saga and tried to help out with the emulation issues. Thanks entirely to him, we have made a huge breakthrough, and are closer than we've ever been to cracking this case... though agonizingly not quite there yet.

What you see above is test footage from our attempts to run The Story of Jonah. First off, it runs, which is a hell of a lot farther than we got before Evvy started helping! He found us a working emulator, which was able to read the image I dumped, and this is as far as we got from that.

The issue now is input. Once it gets to the title screen, all action stops. The game is entirely mouse-driven, but we find ourselves unable to move the mouse or click on anything, no matter how many options and settings we've messed with and what we've tried to do. It's agonizing to be this close yet this far... look! Lost Sheep is right there! Literally all we have to do is scroll over and click on it! ... But that is the point we're currently at.

Still, this was at least major progress, and we did learn a few things even from what we've been able to see so far. First off, wow that is some 90s edutainment aesthetic already. Those company and title screens are FONTASTIC. Like, Graphic Design Is Interlight's Passion.

Also, the splash screen goes back to crediting themselves as Interlight Productions, Inc. This even though the game's box (and LinkedIn profiles from ex-employees I found) credit Interlight International, Inc. David and Goliath (which experiences similar issues of working right up until you need to input something) also uses "International" even in its splash screen, making Jonah's splash screen... unique? I'll have to rip the others and see how many International versus Productions screens we have, but that's a project I'm saving until we get the input issue resolved.

Which has us completely stumped and we're stuck again.

But nnngh so close.

(Also, I just realized how much of a perfect creepypasta setup I've accidentally made this whole saga sound like so far. A completely forgotten game no one on the modern Internet has any record of at all, acquired from a mysterious old man at a yard sale eBay, with a series of slowly yet increasingly detailed blog entries delving into the history and backstory of this fictional game and company, complete with glitches and errors when attempting to play the game, and content we're desperately seeking but haven't been able to access yet this early in the tale. The question is, when we finally do get into Lost Sheep, was the CD-i capable of rendering HYPERREALISTIC BLOOD?)

Edit: I told Evvy that same creepypasta comment as above and then the very next thing we went to run another test with some Lemmings ROM and

"Lemmings (CD-i) test footage" (Watch on YouTube)