How much is a CDTV worth?

[Stephen Coates]

I'm interested in obtaining a CDTV sometime. How much would one be worth either with or without accessories like keyboard and mouse?

I was just wondering because a nice one with accessories sold for £33 on ebay yesterday.

Thanks

[Harrison]

£33??? That was a really good price.

For a standalone CDTV with a working remote, in good boxed condition I would put a price of around £40-50, and with accessories such as black keyboard, floppy drive and mouse I've seen them go over £100 in the past couple of years.

[LowercaseE]

I would like to have a CDTV someday too, but right now I just don't have the room for it or the time to spend messing with it. I can't imagine them getting any easier to find over time though.

[Ghost]

In what way does a CDTV differ from other Amigas with the exception of the standard CD rom?

I saw them once in the store years ago but I couldn't see anything special about them.

[Stephen Coates]

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ih=010&sspagename=STRK%3AMEWA%3AIT&viewitem=&item=200060282972&rd=1&rd=1

Kinda wish I bidded on it now.

[Ghost]

Oh, that is a shame but unfortunate this kind of shit happens.

I am still pissed I forgot all about that Fallout US version they auctioned not so long ago.

[Puni/Void]

Sad that you missed the auction concerning the US version of Fallout. Would love having the original version of that one myself. :( Hope you will find it again sometime in the future.

The CDTV was a cool multimedia machine with slick design. They were not sold in the same quantities as the Amiga 500 and the Amiga 1200. They will be harder and harder to acquire in the future. As for the price, I was a bit surprised it was that low. Thought such an item would sell for much more.

[Demon Cleaner]

As an owner of a CDTV, I have to say that I like it, the design is awesome, and it's bigger than a PS3. But on the other side I'm really disappointed, it's a machine to own, not for real use.

I ran some games over an external floppy drive, and that worked out fine, even playing with the cool remote, but running the demo CD really got me yawning.

[Harrison]

The problem with the CDTV was that it was basically just an A500 with 1MB of ram and a CD drive instead of a floppy drive. As many said at the time, the CDTV was innovation before the world was ready for it. Commodore had the idea right, but the technology wasn't quite ready for their ideas. No proper full motion video was one big problem for any technology at the time, with different systems trying to take advantage of the large capacity of the CD drive for this purpose but instead only capable of running very low quality, blocky video with limited framerate and colour. And this wasn't really addressed until MPEG 1 started to appear and one reason the PSOne was so popular.

The CDTV is still a cool system to own, but as you say DC, not really of much practical use.

[J T]

I'm not sure I've ever seen a CDTV. Nor a CD32.

I'd like to have a go on one just to say I've had a go.

[Harrison]

The CD32 was more of a success than the CDTV, and I purchased one at launch, but sadly it came too late in the Amiga's life as the next generation of consoles (PSOne) were about to appear and blow it out of the water.

There were still some great games released for the CD32 that were worth playing and took advantage of the controller well. The default Commodore CD32 controller was quite bad though, but Competition Pro made a much better one that used the same design as their SNES and Genesis pads of the time and was really nice to use.

A couple of CD32 games that stick in my mind as being really good are Guardian (like a 3D version of defender with SNES Starwing style graphics), and Diggers (a nice mining strategy puzzle game). The CD32 version of Wing Commander was quite cool too. Many games initially released on the CD32 were later ported to the A1200 as AGA versions though.

[Puni/Void]

I have a CD32 is generally an ok console with a wide variety of games. It also includes several ports that makes it possible to expand the machine with new hardware. Some of you might remember the SX add-ons. If you had one of those, you could add a keyboard, mouse, turbocard, harddrive and so on. That was a nice feature which made the CD32 working just as good as an Amiga 1200 with extra hardware.

When it came to games though, I think many people were dissatisfied with the fact that many game companies just copied over games for the Amiga 1200 onto a CD-Rom, and then released it for the CD32. Some of the games are only a few megabytes in size. Far to few took advantage of this consoles capabilities. For example, the version of Gloom for the CD32 is not different from the A1200 version at all. It doesn't include any extras as far as I know. The same goes for the CD32 version of Fears.

A few titles had extra stuff though. Microcosm was only released for the CD32and was graphically outstanding for its time. The CD32 version of Worms had an animated intro, just like Cannon Fodder for CD32. So there are a few nice things to see. :)

The CD32 was also good, because the games always worked. You didn't need to fiddle with configurations and installations and such. You just inserted the CD and you could play instantly.

[Harrison]

The CD32 was also good, because the games always worked. You didn't need to fiddle with configurations and installations and such. You just inserted the CD and you could play instantly.

That is a very good point. For the CD32, it was the one Amiga system where you knew that all of the games you loaded from CD would work.

That was the one thing that could be a big problem with the A1200. Many older ECS games would only work by going into the A1200's boot menu and disabling the cache, the ECS chipset option, or a the two together, and many very old A500 OCS (Kickstart 1.3) games wouldn't work with the A1200 at all unless you had a Kickstart 1.3 downgrader such as the Relokick disk or some of the workbench utilities such as Degrader which you could use to trick the games into thinking the A1200 had less chip ram or no fast ram which often got older OCS games to run. Out of my large collection of Amiga games I think I found about 10 games that will not work with an A1200 regardless of the degrader method used.

Before that the A500 users in the late 80's didn't quite have these configuration issues. The only problems they sometimes encountered were to do with the 512K trapdoor expansion for the A500. Some games would only work with the expansion installed, whereas some of the early Amiga games wouldn't work with it in place. Some people customised their A500's with a switch that would disable the trap door expansion for games that wouldn't run.

The running of games started to get a bit harder when the A500 Plus and A600 appeared as the fixed 1MB of chip ram and the ECS chipset altered some of the ram registers that some early Amiga games programmers had been naughty with and directly accessed in their code on the original A500. When the games tried to run on the 500+ or 600 these registered were different so the game would crash. There were not that many like this but there were a few. The Kickstart 2 roms also caused some problems, but these were mostly fixed using the relokick boot disk that rebooted the Amiga into a kickstart 1.3 based system until it was reset.

At the time I had an A600 and a friend has an A500 Plus. I remember some games that ran perfectly on the A500 Plus wouldn't work on the A600. Strange considering they were near identical. Just shows that small hardware changes can have a big effect when programmers directly access a systems hardware to get the most from it.

[Demon Cleaner]

My CD32 came with 3 or 4 games, and one of them is D/Generation, I know this is one of your favs Harrison :thumbs:

[Harrison]

Yeah, D/Generation is a great game. What do you think of it?

[Demon Cleaner]

I only tested it on the CD32 when I got it, and I found it pretty hard, so i quit immediately, and never tested it again. Have to give it a try some time again.

[Harrison]

It is quite hard to start with, but some practice soon finds you moving through the game quite quickly. It is a great arcade adventure/puzzle game with each room's puzzles to unlock doors, rescue trapped workers etc being very well thought out. It is normally quite obvious what you need to do and always feels like it is your fault when things go wrong.

I found the hardest thing was getting some of the diagonal angles correct when shooting at switches or the exact timing to move between barriers, force fields etc... It's one of those old school games where practice makes perfect and the first time you enter a new area is quite hard until you learn how it works. It is definitely worth sticking with though.

[Stephen Coates]

I'm now bidding on a CDTV thats in Germany. I hope I win it as I', sure it'll look nice underneath my television. I suppose that is the advantage of the CDTV over the A500 - it is just a little box that will happily sit under a TV, rather than needing a proper desk.

Oh, and my Cumana Floppy drive arrived. I'm looking forward to not having to do as much disk swapping as I used to. I've always wanted an extra drive.

[J T]

A CDTV isn't that little is it?

And I got my first external floppy drive just over a year ago. I wish I'd had one back when I was using the Amiga often. But they were pricey back then.

[Puni/Void]

I got my external diskdrive quite early on. It was worth its weight in gold when it came to copying games, demos and programs. No need to change disks while using X-Copy! Made copying those huge stacks of disks much easier than with only one single drive. :) It did of course help when it came to playing games as well.

[Harrison]

An external floppy drive was a great purchase for the Amiga. It really helped with disk copying and for playing multi-disk games. It was always annoying how so many games never supported external floppy drives though and would insist on the next disk being inserted into the internal drive and completely ignoring the external one.

I had quite a few external Amiga drives over the years. Most were from Power Computing and contained the X-Copy Pro compatible hardware for copying non dos disks. I had the 2 drive external unit, a single drive unit, and later on for the A1200 I got a HD floppy unit to use HD 1.76MB Amiga floppies as well as 1.44MB PC floppies. I actually needed to buy that unit so I could access the floppy disks I was using at univeristy at the time.

Good luck on bidding for the CDTV Steve. How much is is going for at the moment? Remember that being a German CDTV it might come with a 110v PSU!

[Demon Cleaner]

I still have two 3½ and one 5¼ inch external floppy drives for the amiga.

[Stephen Coates]

A CDTV isn't that little is it?

I'm not sure how big it is. I was refering more to the shape of it and the fact that it lacks a built in keyboard which makes it more suitable for putting underneath a television.


Good luck on bidding for the CDTV Steve. How much is is going for at the moment? Remember that being a German CDTV it might come with a 110v PSU!

110v? Does Germany not use 240v like we do here? If it does have a 110v power adaptor I'll be able to get a 240v adaptor.

It is currently at £22.79/EUR33.83.

[Demon Cleaner]

Does Germany not use 240v like we do here?Yes, it's 220V/240V (in whole Europe I think). But unlike the GX4000 PSU I got, it doesn't have 3 connectors but 2, standard european.

The CDTV is as big as the very old CD players that were released in the early nineties. I just measured, and it's 430 x 330 x 90 and it's quite heavy.

[Harrison]

Didn't know Germany was 240V. Are you sure whole of Europe is the same? I'm sure France is 110V, but I could be wrong.

[Demon Cleaner]

France is also 220V.

[Stephen Coates]

Didn't know Germany was 240V. Are you sure whole of Europe is the same? I'm sure France is 110V, but I could be wrong.

Yes, Europe is 240v. I know for a fact that France is 240v. I thought it would be a bit odd for Germany to be 110v.

I think there are only a few countries that used 110v.

[Harrison]

Strange. I don't know why I thought they were different.

I found this useful voltages in each country Wiki page. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_mains_power_plugs,_voltages_and_frequencies

The US and Japan are 110V but most other places are 240V.

[Teho]

The thing with the CDTV's size is that it wasn't designed or marketed to be a computer system in the first place, but rather a multimedia machine belonging in the livingroom. Commodore even insisted that retailers not have it in their computer sections, but in their stereo sections instead. So it's the same size as other stereo components from that time so it'd fit into any rack and blend in perfectly.

[Harrison]

Although by todays standards it is quite big. And the CD caddy is just as annoying as all the early CD systems that used them.

[Stephen Coates]

Is it easy to get a CD into the caddy?

I am quite interested to try out one of these caddy loading CDROM drives as I have never used one before.

EDIT: I found this a few minutes ago. Look interesting: http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=21596

[Demon Cleaner]

Is it easy to get a CD into the caddy?You just stick it in like you would insert a toast. That has nothing special and difficult.

[J T]

Yeah except they are a pain in the ass, every time you want to put a different CD in you have to open up the caddy and put the CD away, then get the new one and put it in the caddy. Not a big deal when you read it like that, but after a few times you'll probably see what I mean.

I used a CD-ROM with a caddy at school many years ago, when CD-ROM was very new (and not really actually used for much). Some of the standalone Panasonic DVD burners can take discs in caddies, but most people don't bother and just use the bare disc.

[Harrison]

I used caddies a lot when CD first appeared on computer. The first CD Writers all used caddies and they do get annoying when you want to change discs. Many people used to have a few caddies with their drives to keep a selection of their most used discs ready to just insert.

It's funny to think they used caddies because they didn't think they would be able to cope with the vibration or be able to read or write accurately otherwise. And that was for 1x CD units writing at 1x speed (150Kbps). Those old drives used to take an hour to burn a CD! mad.

Actually, so did the first authoring DVD drive I used to use at work. You definitely had to make sure the project you wanted to burn to disc was correct as you didn't want to be waiting an hour too many times, or wasting discs as they used to cost a lot too. I think the first DVD Authoring discs I used to purchase for work were about £10 each!

[Harrison]

Is it easy to get a CD into the caddy?

I am quite interested to try out one of these caddy loading CDROM drives as I have never used one before.

It is easy to use the caddies. As the others have said, it is just annoying after a couple of uses, having to eject the caddy, then remove the disc from it, put that disc away, get another disc out, insert into caddy, then insert into drive. Only one step extra really involved but it does make the process of inserting a disc a lot slower. And what a nightmare if you lose the caddy!



EDIT: I found this a few minutes ago. Look interesting: http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=21596

That guy has done a lot to his CDTV for sure. I expect some of the upgrade parts are harder to find these days though, especially the Mini-Mega chip ram upgrade. I like the case upgrade he has done too, looks very smart, although it does make the CDTV even bigger.

One cool feature of the CDTV is that it does have SCSI built in, as the CD drive uses it and I think I remember (I may be wrong) there is a port on the back for external SCSI devices.

[THB]

Sadly it doesn't use SCSI and adding a SCSI port to it is a costly exercise requiring extra hardware. The default CD-ROM uses a proprietary connector that isn't exactly SCSI. That said I love my CDTV, I like setting up my own CDs they are like small 700meg HDDs. :)

Just wish it had more ram and proper joystick ports but both of those things are fixable when I have some spare time.

[Harrison]

You used to be able to get many internal upgrades for the CDTV. They are probably quite rare these days but you used to be able to upgrade the kickstart to 2.04, the chip ram to 2MB and some fast ram too. I'm sure there was also an accelerator released as well but am not 100% sure about that.

Are you sure there isn't a SCSI port on the back of the CDTV? I'm sure the first CDTV's had one, but it was a proprietary round port. I remember reading about it in the issue of Amiga World that covered the CDTV launch, and they even mentioned the future ability to add an external HD.

[THB]

Its an optional extra sadly, quite expensive and rare.

[Harrison]

That is annoying to learn. CDTV stuff was rare enough when new, so it must be very hard to find these days.

DO you use your CDTV often?

[THB]

I have it set up under the TV but rarely get a chance to use it. I am working on a compilation CD where I basically take AmigaDOS format games from various floppy compilations and put them on a CD with a not so fancy menu. The thing about the CDTV is that it has one meg chip and part of that is used for the cd-rom driver. So what you end up with is an a500 WITH 950KB chip ram... not the ideal compatibility situation. :/

Still it is a lot of fun when the games work. :) And the composite output of the cdtv is much nicer than that of the 1200/600/1000. The rest all have B&W composite output iirc.

[Harrison]

A600/A1200 composite output is in colour, but as you said the A500's is in B/W which is always annoying when I can't locate one of my modulators.

Have you tried some of the CD32 compilation CDs that many people have created? Some contain over 800 games and I expect many will run on the CDTV. Underground gamer have a lot of them available for download if you are interested. PM me if you need further details, or an invite to that site.

[THB]

The cd32 compilations are mostly whdload based with some jst installs as well. Sadly the majority of these games will not work on an OCS based machine without some serious upgrades. I think even the main menu requires AGA.

I have a cd32 also and a few of these compilation CDs.

KillerGorilla is working on an OCS/ECS/AGA compatible frontend. There is a thread over on EAB about it.