How much is a CDTV worth?

[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

[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.