Wednesday 10th March 2010
Home 
Website Development Design Consultancy Hosting Internet Marketing Support Chinese Websites About Us
Website Development Design Consultancy Hosting Internet Marketing Support Chinese Websites About Us 
This is a review I wrote for, I think, Amiga User International magazine about 9 years ago. This is the file as I submitted it,
so it may well have been edited before publication.
Sega and Nintendo said it couldn't be done, but Commodore have proved them wrong by bringing out the worlds first 32-bit CD-ROM based console, and at an affordable price.
By combining the 32-bit technology of the A1200 with a fast double-speed CD-ROM drive in a small megadrive-style box at a price directly aimed at Sega and Nintendo.
The machine looks totally unlike every other Amiga, and at first glance you would be forgiven for thinking it was a Megadrive. Only the big '32 Bit' and 'Amiga CD32' logos point to the power contained in the dark grey box.
One thing the CD32 isn't is the CDTV-2. CDTV was designed to do something totally different - a home multimedia system for entertainment, education, reference and productivity, and was never really given long enough to prove itself.
The CD32 is purely a games machine. It's a ready-made market and Commodore have come out with the CD32 at exactly the right time.
The CD32 is simple to operate. Open the flip-top lid to reveal the tray for the CD. The CD32 does not require the caddies that annoy most CDTV and A570 users (although I must admit I prefer the caddy system - discs are too easily scratched without caddys), and doesn't have a built-in lens cleaner like CDTV, so be prepared to regularly clean the lens on the CD32 if you buy one, especially if you live in a house with smokers. CD lens cleaning solutions or special CD cleaning discs are available from most HiFi stores.
Powering on the CDTV reveals a rather pretty title screen using 256 colours and colour cycling, along with an irritating and somewhat out of place musical ditty. Both of these stop as soon as you load a CD and lower the lid. What happens next depends on the type of cd you put in.
The new CD32 titles are discs especially written for the new machine. Some of these (for example RoboCod and Pinball Fantasies) are enhanced versions of classic Amiga games. Most CD32 titles use CD quality audio and oodles of animation, sound and extra graphics. Some have extra levels, and a few, such as Microcosm from Psygnosis, have been developed exclusively for CD. No finished CD32 titles were available in time for this review, although several (including Diggers, RoboCod and Pinball Fantasies) should be finished by the time you read this.
CD32 disks contain a data track which contains program data in exactly the same way that floppy disks and hard disks do, and the CD32 will 'boot' from a CD in the same way any Amiga will boot from a floppy disk. Unlike floppy or hard disks the CD can also contain up to 98 other audio tracks. These are identical to audio tracks on a music CD, indeed you can play these tracks on CD32 and CDTV discs in a standard CD Audio player (although be careful, some players will try and play track 1 which can be extremely noisy! If you remember what it was like playing Spectrum or Commodore 64 tapes in your hifi at full volume you'll know what I mean.
Most standard CDTV titles will work in the CD32, although many require a mouse (luckily the CD32, unlike CDTV, has standard mouse/joystick ports so you can plug in any standard Amiga mouse. Some titles, especially PD collections, require a floppy disk drive, and currently no floppy drive can be connected to CD32.
CD32 will also play your Audio CD's. Inserting an audio CD brings up a smart menu similar to the one on the CDTV, but it reacts faster and is simpler to use than its predecessor. Like CDTV you can control CDs from the joypad, but unlike the CDTV there aren't any buttons on the main unit to control CD play. CDTV had problems with a few audio CDs, especially extra-long CDs with lots of tracks. All CDs I tried in CD32, including a couple known to cause problems on CDTV, worked fine. The audio quality, when put through an amplifier or into a TV with reasonable speakers, is excellent.
CD+G discs, special audio CD's with simple graphics (not to be confused with the obsolete CDVideo discs) can also be used. These come up with simple graphic sequences. Most CD+G discs are karaoke discs, and both CD+G discs I tried in Amiga CD32 worked without problems, in fact the CD+G code has been improved since CDTV. There are no more errors in the graphics decoding, and the control for CD+G has been greatly simplified.
In producing a low-cost console Amiga it is inevitable that things had to go. The usual complement of expansion ports found on every Amiga since the Amiga 1000 has been cut down to the bare minimum, and some would say below the minimum, required.
The RGB port has been removed, although a S-VHS output is now supplied which gives an extremely good picture on S-VHS TVs and monitors. With S-VHS, RF and Composite it is now possible to connect the CD32 to almost any TV or video system and obtain superb quality output. Many modern TVs have S-VHS inputs at the front of the TV, so connecting the CD32 doesn't require all that tedious messing around with SCART sockets and cables hanging out of the back of your TV that previous machines needed. Even the RF output quality is good, so whatever TV you have your CD32 will work. The S-VHS output can also be connected to any monitor that has seperate Chroma and Luminance inputs, such as the 1084S and even the old 1701 C64 monitors, although a special lead is required.
The parallel and serial ports have been removed, so you can't connect external modems, printers, digitizers, and so on. Obviously most of these are rather pointless on a games console, but there are two things that some people will miss. No serial port means no two-machine linked games, and no parallel port means the CD32 can't be linked to another Amiga with the Parnet network cable to transfer data from CD to Amiga (many CDTV owners use this to use their CDTV as an external CD-ROM drive on their Amiga).
Most suprising is the lack of a floppy disk drive port, especially considering the amount of games already on Amiga disk format. It may be that the cost of adding the floppy drive interface circuitry was too much, or possibly it was pressure from software publishers, eager to convert over to unpiratable CD-ROM and unwilling to see the machine able to run floppy (and along with that pirate) software too. Whatever the reason it makes the CD32 a totally closed system. You can't put data into it, except on CD, and you can't take data out of it onto disk or via in/out ports.
The CD32 also has standard mouse and joystick ports, something sorely missed from CDTV. The supplied controller is rather Nintendo-esque in design, down to the buttons on the top left and right sides, plus four fire buttons, a start/stop button and an 8 way direction pad, enough for the most frantic of beat-em-up games. The controller links to a standard mouse or joystick port, and apparently will work with any Amiga when used with the right driver software, so you will no doubt see lots of software starting to support the new joypad.
The controller comes with a nice long lead, it's nice to see someone putting some thought into how the unit will usually be used, although there's definately some left-handed militant designer at Commodore, as the joystick/mouse ports are on the left-hand side (as on the A4000) to the irritation of right-handed people like myself.
Next to the Joystick ports is a mysteriously labelled 'aux' socket that turns out to be nothing more than a standard A4000 keyboard socket. Annoyingly the black CDTV keyboards do not work, only the white A4000 keyboards which are not available seperately. Commodore say that other expansions including virtual reality 'gloves' are being developed for this port, but to be honest I don't believe them.
The CD32 does have one large monster-sized expansion connector, which carries all the relevent lines to add all the missing ports to with an external board. At the CD32 launch some developers were running from machines fitted with 'debug' boards connected to the back containing all the missing interfaces. This will apparently become the basis of a Commodore 'base unit', containing all the ports and interfaces, along with floppy disk and ram expansion, to make the CD32 into a true Amiga computer.
This expansion also contains the space for the add-on FMV cartridge. This will be out before Christmas, at under £200, if you believe Commodore's PR speak. Commodore are working hard to try to beat Philips to the market with FMV (Philips are currently running over 9 months late).
Until then the CD32 is capable of CDXL video, similar to the 1/4 screen video seen on the CDTV, but because of the faster processor, better chipset and most importantly the double speed CD ROM drive, it is capable of 3/4 screen full motion video purely in software, light years ahead of the attrotious 8 colour dithered video that the Sega CD inflicts on its users.
Unfortunately CD32 does not support the Kodak PhotoCD format. The hardware is ideal for PhotoCD support, all that is needed is software to display PhotoCD images, and if it had a floppy disk drive I'd write it tomorrow. It appears that Commodore have had problems licencing the PhotoCD rights from Kodak, or again it may have been a cost issue, PhotoCD costing too much to implement at this stage. Whatever happened, it's inevitable that PhotoCD will be supported sooner or later seeing as the hardware is capable of supporting the multisession XA format discs that PhotoCD images come on, in fact the multisession ability is little use for anything other than PhotoCD.
On the top of the CD32 case there is a 3.5mm headphone socket plus a volume slider for the headphones. As on the CDTV and A570 the volume slider only affects the volume through the headphones, and has nothing at all to do with the volume levels through the Audio out or the TV output.
Next to this are the power and disc activity lights, and a reset button, although you do not need to use this all the time. Most discs reset automatically when you open the flip top lid and take out the CD, but this can be prevented (when you have a product on more than one CD, or a product like Video Creator that allows you to use your audio CDs.
The power on/off button is on the back of the CD32 rather than on the power supply, which means the power supply needs to be turned off at the wall when not in use to avoid overheating.
Where does this new machine leave owners of other Amigas? Well, if you own one of the older pre-AGA (A1000, A500, A500+, A600, A1500, A2000, A3000) Amigas you will be not suprised to hear that there's no way to get CD32 discs running on your computer. CD32 requires the AGA chipset, and none of these machines come with, or can be upgraded to, the AGA chipset.
CDTV can't be upgraded to run CD32 either. There is no way to upgrade a CDTV to the minimum standard required for CD32, it requires replacement of almost everything, including the CD-ROM, and the motherboard, that is of course if the replacement parts were available, which they aren't.
With the Amiga 1200 and 4000, Commodore have said they will support CD32 emulation on these machines with add-on devices.
The A1200 device will not connect to the PCMCIA port as previously thought, but will be connected via a trapdoor expansion (so almost certainly won't fit if you have a 32-bit ram card or acclerator in your A1200) connected to an external expansion. It will also require replacement Kickstart 3.1 ROMS, but thankfully the ROMS are socketed on the A1200 so this isn't a major problem.
The A4000 device may not be a 'true' CD32 emulation at all, but will probably be a SCSI device with software CD32 emulation, although even on the 4000/040 this may not be fast enough to emulate the Chunky-to-Planar hardware (see below). Most 4000 owners will probably want CD-ROM more for access to multimedia, PD and PhotoCD discs, and third party CD-ROM drives allowing access to all of these are already available for the A4000 (and all other Amigas except the A600).
Commodore certainly think they do, and they have managed to convince almost all the key software developers in the UK that it's worth developing for, something they were never able to do with CDTV.
With a true 32-bit machine and a fast CD-ROM at under £300 (the Megadrive/Mega CD bundle costs £399, and that is only a 16-bit machine with terrible graphics quality) all Commodore have to do is get their marketing right, something they have had terrible problems with in the past, and they are on to a certain winner.
The big question is will the Kids switch to Amiga CD32 from the Sega and Nintendo? I asked Dorian, my 10 year old brother and confirmed Super-Nintendo freak what he though of it: "Mega CD is a rip off, this is much cheaper and better. I like the controller and the CD32 looks decent." So there you have it. If games like Jurassic Park and Mortal Kombat make it out on CD32 soon then it's going to be a monster hit this Christmas.
Should you buy it? If you're into Amiga games then yes. Within a year floppy disk could be dead as a game distribution format. Publishers are eager to utilise the huge potential that CD gives them, and at the same time put an end to piracy that has caused so much damage to the industry.
And at £299, now exactly the same price as the A1200, which is the better buy? Well, if you want CD games, then the CD32 is currently the only choice. The CD drive for the A1200 is still not available, and I doubt it will be available this side of Christmas. It is highly likely that the 'computer' expansion box for the CD32 will be available long before the A1200 CD-ROM drive (which itself is unlikely to cost much less than the CD32).
As more publishers take the plunge and like Millennium with Diggers, release on CD first and a cut-down floppy disk version later, it makes little sense to rely on floppy disk software.
The potential of the CD32 is massive. The hardware is excellent, there are a lot of programmers who know how to develop for Amiga, and the development costs are relatively small. It will take a few good quality titles to make CD32 a success, and these are definately on the way.
I am currently finishing my first title on CD32, called Video Creator (described elsewhere in this issue) and I'm confident that CD32 is going to sell well enough that I'll be able to develop more titles in the future.
If it had a floppy drive connector and PhotoCD support, then it would be excellent, although I suspect it wouldn't have been able to have these and still come out at under £300.
Would I buy one? My own CD32 is already on order, and I can't wait for it.
Here are the technical specs for the new Amiga CD32
One of the problems with the Amiga graphics design is that it works on bitplanes. Each pixel on a 256 colour screen is broken into 8 bits which are stored in 8 different planes in different areas of RAM. What this means is that to plot a pixel on a 256 colour screen requires 8 seperate writes to memory, which can be rather slow. The advantages of this system is that the bitplane system makes it much easier for parallax-scrolling games and for many other tricks that make Amiga games unique, plus you can have as many bitplanes as you require (up to 8).
The PC VGA standard uses a different system called byte-per-pixel. Each pixel on the screen is directly represented by a single byte in the display memory. Writing a pixel to the screen requires only one write to memory, so it is much faster than bitplane mode for most operations on 256 colour screens. The disadvantages are that it's inflexible (byte-per-pixel requires enough RAM for a 256 colour screen however many colours you want to use), and it's no use at all for scrolling games, especially those requiring parallax-type effects.
But for 3d games like flight simulators, or other games requiring fast graphics scaling, like Wing Commander the VGA system is better. Wing Commander on the Amiga draws its graphics to an imaginary byte-per-pixel screen then uses a complex algorithm to convert the finished VGA screen into an Amiga bitplane-based screen. This is unfortunately a rather slow process and results in poorer performance than the PC version.
What the Amiga CD32 gate array does is perform this VGA-style to bitplane conversion extemely fast in hardware, so your game can spend more time doing other things, resulting in faster and better games. When this hardware filters down the system to reach other Amiga models, it has another immediate benefit. Current PC emulators can't emulate VGA screens quickly because of exactly this problem. This hardware, combined with a PC emulator, should allow you to emulate PC VGA software far faster than is currently possible.
AGA : Advanced Graphics Architecture - The chips in the A1200/A4000 and CD32 that allow up to 256 colours to be displayed on screen.
CD-ROM : Compact Disc - Read Only Memory - A CD, identical in appearance to your Dire Straits disc, but containg computer data.
CDTV : Commodore Dynamic Total Vision - Commodore's previous attempt at a CD-ROM based Amiga. Aimed at the home 'edutainment' market it was a slow seller and is no longer in production.
CDXL : A format for simple partial screen motion video from CD on CDTV and Amiga CD32.
FMV : Full Motion Video - Using MPEG to play back better than VHS quality video from a CD.
Jurassic Park: A film with some dinosaurs in it.
MPEG : Motion Picture Experts Group, they decided on a format for highly compressed video that can squeeze video to small enough files to play from CD.
Multisession: Writable CD discs can be written to several times before they are full (data can be added, but previous data cannot be altered or removed). A multisession drive is a drive capable of reading this type of CD.
NTSC: National Televison Standards Committee (USA): American TV standard, incompatible with PAL (UK).
PAL: Phase Alternate Linescan, which is the video system used by your TV if you live in the UK and most of the more civilized parts of Europe.
Photo CD: A Kodak system for storing up to 100 photographs on a writable CD. You can take your 35mm film and get it transfered to CD.
SECAM: The French TV system, similar to PAL. Used in France, Russia, and a few other equally interesting places.
CD32 - The review
By Jolyon Ralph
Sega and Nintendo said it couldn't be done, but Commodore have proved them wrong by bringing out the worlds first 32-bit CD-ROM based console, and at an affordable price.
By combining the 32-bit technology of the A1200 with a fast double-speed CD-ROM drive in a small megadrive-style box at a price directly aimed at Sega and Nintendo.
The machine looks totally unlike every other Amiga, and at first glance you would be forgiven for thinking it was a Megadrive. Only the big '32 Bit' and 'Amiga CD32' logos point to the power contained in the dark grey box.
One thing the CD32 isn't is the CDTV-2. CDTV was designed to do something totally different - a home multimedia system for entertainment, education, reference and productivity, and was never really given long enough to prove itself.
The CD32 is purely a games machine. It's a ready-made market and Commodore have come out with the CD32 at exactly the right time.
The CD32 is simple to operate. Open the flip-top lid to reveal the tray for the CD. The CD32 does not require the caddies that annoy most CDTV and A570 users (although I must admit I prefer the caddy system - discs are too easily scratched without caddys), and doesn't have a built-in lens cleaner like CDTV, so be prepared to regularly clean the lens on the CD32 if you buy one, especially if you live in a house with smokers. CD lens cleaning solutions or special CD cleaning discs are available from most HiFi stores.
Powering on the CDTV reveals a rather pretty title screen using 256 colours and colour cycling, along with an irritating and somewhat out of place musical ditty. Both of these stop as soon as you load a CD and lower the lid. What happens next depends on the type of cd you put in.
The new CD32 titles are discs especially written for the new machine. Some of these (for example RoboCod and Pinball Fantasies) are enhanced versions of classic Amiga games. Most CD32 titles use CD quality audio and oodles of animation, sound and extra graphics. Some have extra levels, and a few, such as Microcosm from Psygnosis, have been developed exclusively for CD. No finished CD32 titles were available in time for this review, although several (including Diggers, RoboCod and Pinball Fantasies) should be finished by the time you read this.
CD32 disks contain a data track which contains program data in exactly the same way that floppy disks and hard disks do, and the CD32 will 'boot' from a CD in the same way any Amiga will boot from a floppy disk. Unlike floppy or hard disks the CD can also contain up to 98 other audio tracks. These are identical to audio tracks on a music CD, indeed you can play these tracks on CD32 and CDTV discs in a standard CD Audio player (although be careful, some players will try and play track 1 which can be extremely noisy! If you remember what it was like playing Spectrum or Commodore 64 tapes in your hifi at full volume you'll know what I mean.
Most standard CDTV titles will work in the CD32, although many require a mouse (luckily the CD32, unlike CDTV, has standard mouse/joystick ports so you can plug in any standard Amiga mouse. Some titles, especially PD collections, require a floppy disk drive, and currently no floppy drive can be connected to CD32.
CD32 will also play your Audio CD's. Inserting an audio CD brings up a smart menu similar to the one on the CDTV, but it reacts faster and is simpler to use than its predecessor. Like CDTV you can control CDs from the joypad, but unlike the CDTV there aren't any buttons on the main unit to control CD play. CDTV had problems with a few audio CDs, especially extra-long CDs with lots of tracks. All CDs I tried in CD32, including a couple known to cause problems on CDTV, worked fine. The audio quality, when put through an amplifier or into a TV with reasonable speakers, is excellent.
CD+G discs, special audio CD's with simple graphics (not to be confused with the obsolete CDVideo discs) can also be used. These come up with simple graphic sequences. Most CD+G discs are karaoke discs, and both CD+G discs I tried in Amiga CD32 worked without problems, in fact the CD+G code has been improved since CDTV. There are no more errors in the graphics decoding, and the control for CD+G has been greatly simplified.
In producing a low-cost console Amiga it is inevitable that things had to go. The usual complement of expansion ports found on every Amiga since the Amiga 1000 has been cut down to the bare minimum, and some would say below the minimum, required.
The RGB port has been removed, although a S-VHS output is now supplied which gives an extremely good picture on S-VHS TVs and monitors. With S-VHS, RF and Composite it is now possible to connect the CD32 to almost any TV or video system and obtain superb quality output. Many modern TVs have S-VHS inputs at the front of the TV, so connecting the CD32 doesn't require all that tedious messing around with SCART sockets and cables hanging out of the back of your TV that previous machines needed. Even the RF output quality is good, so whatever TV you have your CD32 will work. The S-VHS output can also be connected to any monitor that has seperate Chroma and Luminance inputs, such as the 1084S and even the old 1701 C64 monitors, although a special lead is required.
The parallel and serial ports have been removed, so you can't connect external modems, printers, digitizers, and so on. Obviously most of these are rather pointless on a games console, but there are two things that some people will miss. No serial port means no two-machine linked games, and no parallel port means the CD32 can't be linked to another Amiga with the Parnet network cable to transfer data from CD to Amiga (many CDTV owners use this to use their CDTV as an external CD-ROM drive on their Amiga).
Most suprising is the lack of a floppy disk drive port, especially considering the amount of games already on Amiga disk format. It may be that the cost of adding the floppy drive interface circuitry was too much, or possibly it was pressure from software publishers, eager to convert over to unpiratable CD-ROM and unwilling to see the machine able to run floppy (and along with that pirate) software too. Whatever the reason it makes the CD32 a totally closed system. You can't put data into it, except on CD, and you can't take data out of it onto disk or via in/out ports.
The CD32 also has standard mouse and joystick ports, something sorely missed from CDTV. The supplied controller is rather Nintendo-esque in design, down to the buttons on the top left and right sides, plus four fire buttons, a start/stop button and an 8 way direction pad, enough for the most frantic of beat-em-up games. The controller links to a standard mouse or joystick port, and apparently will work with any Amiga when used with the right driver software, so you will no doubt see lots of software starting to support the new joypad.
The controller comes with a nice long lead, it's nice to see someone putting some thought into how the unit will usually be used, although there's definately some left-handed militant designer at Commodore, as the joystick/mouse ports are on the left-hand side (as on the A4000) to the irritation of right-handed people like myself.
Next to the Joystick ports is a mysteriously labelled 'aux' socket that turns out to be nothing more than a standard A4000 keyboard socket. Annoyingly the black CDTV keyboards do not work, only the white A4000 keyboards which are not available seperately. Commodore say that other expansions including virtual reality 'gloves' are being developed for this port, but to be honest I don't believe them.
The CD32 does have one large monster-sized expansion connector, which carries all the relevent lines to add all the missing ports to with an external board. At the CD32 launch some developers were running from machines fitted with 'debug' boards connected to the back containing all the missing interfaces. This will apparently become the basis of a Commodore 'base unit', containing all the ports and interfaces, along with floppy disk and ram expansion, to make the CD32 into a true Amiga computer.
This expansion also contains the space for the add-on FMV cartridge. This will be out before Christmas, at under £200, if you believe Commodore's PR speak. Commodore are working hard to try to beat Philips to the market with FMV (Philips are currently running over 9 months late).
Until then the CD32 is capable of CDXL video, similar to the 1/4 screen video seen on the CDTV, but because of the faster processor, better chipset and most importantly the double speed CD ROM drive, it is capable of 3/4 screen full motion video purely in software, light years ahead of the attrotious 8 colour dithered video that the Sega CD inflicts on its users.
Unfortunately CD32 does not support the Kodak PhotoCD format. The hardware is ideal for PhotoCD support, all that is needed is software to display PhotoCD images, and if it had a floppy disk drive I'd write it tomorrow. It appears that Commodore have had problems licencing the PhotoCD rights from Kodak, or again it may have been a cost issue, PhotoCD costing too much to implement at this stage. Whatever happened, it's inevitable that PhotoCD will be supported sooner or later seeing as the hardware is capable of supporting the multisession XA format discs that PhotoCD images come on, in fact the multisession ability is little use for anything other than PhotoCD.
On the top of the CD32 case there is a 3.5mm headphone socket plus a volume slider for the headphones. As on the CDTV and A570 the volume slider only affects the volume through the headphones, and has nothing at all to do with the volume levels through the Audio out or the TV output.
Next to this are the power and disc activity lights, and a reset button, although you do not need to use this all the time. Most discs reset automatically when you open the flip top lid and take out the CD, but this can be prevented (when you have a product on more than one CD, or a product like Video Creator that allows you to use your audio CDs.
The power on/off button is on the back of the CD32 rather than on the power supply, which means the power supply needs to be turned off at the wall when not in use to avoid overheating.
Where does this new machine leave owners of other Amigas? Well, if you own one of the older pre-AGA (A1000, A500, A500+, A600, A1500, A2000, A3000) Amigas you will be not suprised to hear that there's no way to get CD32 discs running on your computer. CD32 requires the AGA chipset, and none of these machines come with, or can be upgraded to, the AGA chipset.
CDTV can't be upgraded to run CD32 either. There is no way to upgrade a CDTV to the minimum standard required for CD32, it requires replacement of almost everything, including the CD-ROM, and the motherboard, that is of course if the replacement parts were available, which they aren't.
With the Amiga 1200 and 4000, Commodore have said they will support CD32 emulation on these machines with add-on devices.
The A1200 device will not connect to the PCMCIA port as previously thought, but will be connected via a trapdoor expansion (so almost certainly won't fit if you have a 32-bit ram card or acclerator in your A1200) connected to an external expansion. It will also require replacement Kickstart 3.1 ROMS, but thankfully the ROMS are socketed on the A1200 so this isn't a major problem.
The A4000 device may not be a 'true' CD32 emulation at all, but will probably be a SCSI device with software CD32 emulation, although even on the 4000/040 this may not be fast enough to emulate the Chunky-to-Planar hardware (see below). Most 4000 owners will probably want CD-ROM more for access to multimedia, PD and PhotoCD discs, and third party CD-ROM drives allowing access to all of these are already available for the A4000 (and all other Amigas except the A600).
Do Commodore have a winner in the agressive console market?
Commodore certainly think they do, and they have managed to convince almost all the key software developers in the UK that it's worth developing for, something they were never able to do with CDTV.
With a true 32-bit machine and a fast CD-ROM at under £300 (the Megadrive/Mega CD bundle costs £399, and that is only a 16-bit machine with terrible graphics quality) all Commodore have to do is get their marketing right, something they have had terrible problems with in the past, and they are on to a certain winner.
The big question is will the Kids switch to Amiga CD32 from the Sega and Nintendo? I asked Dorian, my 10 year old brother and confirmed Super-Nintendo freak what he though of it: "Mega CD is a rip off, this is much cheaper and better. I like the controller and the CD32 looks decent." So there you have it. If games like Jurassic Park and Mortal Kombat make it out on CD32 soon then it's going to be a monster hit this Christmas.
Should you buy it? If you're into Amiga games then yes. Within a year floppy disk could be dead as a game distribution format. Publishers are eager to utilise the huge potential that CD gives them, and at the same time put an end to piracy that has caused so much damage to the industry.
And at £299, now exactly the same price as the A1200, which is the better buy? Well, if you want CD games, then the CD32 is currently the only choice. The CD drive for the A1200 is still not available, and I doubt it will be available this side of Christmas. It is highly likely that the 'computer' expansion box for the CD32 will be available long before the A1200 CD-ROM drive (which itself is unlikely to cost much less than the CD32).
As more publishers take the plunge and like Millennium with Diggers, release on CD first and a cut-down floppy disk version later, it makes little sense to rely on floppy disk software.
The potential of the CD32 is massive. The hardware is excellent, there are a lot of programmers who know how to develop for Amiga, and the development costs are relatively small. It will take a few good quality titles to make CD32 a success, and these are definately on the way.
I am currently finishing my first title on CD32, called Video Creator (described elsewhere in this issue) and I'm confident that CD32 is going to sell well enough that I'll be able to develop more titles in the future.
If it had a floppy drive connector and PhotoCD support, then it would be excellent, although I suspect it wouldn't have been able to have these and still come out at under £300.
Would I buy one? My own CD32 is already on order, and I can't wait for it.
CDTV Titles
Commodore claim that over 60% of CDTV titles work on CD32, here are a few discs we tried and the results:Lemmings - Works fine.
Global Chaos - Works fine.
Fine Art Collection - Works fine.
Psygnosis 'AmigaCD' demo
- Works fine
CDPD - Requires mouse, works fine.
CDPD2 - Requires mouse, works fine.
Fractal Universe - Works fine except fractal generators require mouse.
17Bit CD - Will not work as it requires floppy disk drive.
Demo CD - Requires mouse, works fine.
Battle Chess - Requires mouse, works fine.
Dinosaurs for Hire - Works fine.
Xenon II - Appears OK, some problems with shop sequence.
World Vista Atlas - Does not work.
Fun School 3 - Works fine.
Turrican II - Does not work.
Curse of RA - Does not work.
Compare for yourself box-out
CD32 CDTV CDi Sega MegaCD
Price (RRP) £299 £299 £499 £399 (inc Megadrive)
Arcitecture 32bit 16bit 16bit 16bit
Processor 68EC020 68000 68070*** 68000
Procesor Speed 14Mhz 7.14Mhz 16Mhz 12Mhz
RAM 2Mb 1Mb 1Mb 64Kb(!)
CDROM Speed Double Single Single Single
CD Audio Support Yes Yes Yes Yes
Colours Available 16Million 4096 16Million 512
Max on screen(*) 256 32 256 64
RF (TV) output Yes Yes Yes Yes
Composite Video out Yes Yes Yes Yes
S-VHS output Yes NTSC only Yes No
Keyboard socket Yes Yes Yes No
Floppy drive port No** Yes No No
Standard Joystick
connectors Yes No** No Yes
Requires Caddies No Yes No No
Photo CD support No** No** Yes No
Movie CD support No** No No** No
CDXL support Yes Yes No No
Arcade-quality games Yes Some No Yes
Reference/Serious
titles available Yes Yes Yes No
Expandable to home
computer No** Yes No No
Average title price £30 £30 £50 £50
* Max colours on screen in standard modes for games etc.
** With optional add-on.
*** 68070 is custom 16-bit 68000 variant
boxout - Tech specs
Here are the technical specs for the new Amiga CD32
Processor: 68EC020 at 14Mhz (same as A1200)
RAM: 2Mb CHIP ram (same as A1200) plus 1Kb of nonvolatile RAM for
storing hi-scores, savegames, etc.
ROM: Kickstart 3.1 (Version 40.58) - similar to the 3.0 ROM in the
Amiga 1200/4000, but with new libraries and other support code for the
CD-ROM mechanism.
Chipset: AA Chipset (as on Amiga 1200) plus new chunky-to-planar hardware
(see below)
Video Out: RF (PAL, NTSC, or SECAM units available) to connect to aerial
socket on your TV, Composite Video and Super-VHS outputs are available.
There is no RGB monitor port on the standard CD32.
Aux Connector: Standard A4000-style keyboard connector. Other possible
add-ons include multi-joystick adaptors, virtual reality 'gloves'.
Joystick Ports: 2 standard Amiga joystick/mouse ports capable of supporting
digital and analogue joysticks, mice, trackballs and light pens as well
as the new CD32 multi-button controller.
Expansion bus: full expansion bus allowing possible further expansions
including:
Parallel/Serial/Floppy/RGB
Photo CD support
Full Motion Video (FMV) MPEG decoder board
Ram Expansion
Processor Accelerators (68030/68040 etc)
Hard disk interfaces (IDE, SCSI, SCSI 2, etc)
Networking
PCMCIA
CD-ROM: Top-loading double speed (300Kb/sec data rate) multisession CD drive.
Unlike CDTV the drive does not require caddies and is not self-cleaning.
Compatible with:
CD-Audio
CDTV titles (most seem to work)
CD+G audio discs with graphics (including Karaoke discs)
CD32 specific titles
Movie-CD discs (with optional MPEG board)
Chunky-To-Planar - The new magic hardware
The new Amiga CD32 contains a rather special new piece of hardware called a chunky-to-planar gate array. If you program games you'll instantly go 'wow!', but if you don't here's how it works, and why it's so good:One of the problems with the Amiga graphics design is that it works on bitplanes. Each pixel on a 256 colour screen is broken into 8 bits which are stored in 8 different planes in different areas of RAM. What this means is that to plot a pixel on a 256 colour screen requires 8 seperate writes to memory, which can be rather slow. The advantages of this system is that the bitplane system makes it much easier for parallax-scrolling games and for many other tricks that make Amiga games unique, plus you can have as many bitplanes as you require (up to 8).
The PC VGA standard uses a different system called byte-per-pixel. Each pixel on the screen is directly represented by a single byte in the display memory. Writing a pixel to the screen requires only one write to memory, so it is much faster than bitplane mode for most operations on 256 colour screens. The disadvantages are that it's inflexible (byte-per-pixel requires enough RAM for a 256 colour screen however many colours you want to use), and it's no use at all for scrolling games, especially those requiring parallax-type effects.
But for 3d games like flight simulators, or other games requiring fast graphics scaling, like Wing Commander the VGA system is better. Wing Commander on the Amiga draws its graphics to an imaginary byte-per-pixel screen then uses a complex algorithm to convert the finished VGA screen into an Amiga bitplane-based screen. This is unfortunately a rather slow process and results in poorer performance than the PC version.
What the Amiga CD32 gate array does is perform this VGA-style to bitplane conversion extemely fast in hardware, so your game can spend more time doing other things, resulting in faster and better games. When this hardware filters down the system to reach other Amiga models, it has another immediate benefit. Current PC emulators can't emulate VGA screens quickly because of exactly this problem. This hardware, combined with a PC emulator, should allow you to emulate PC VGA software far faster than is currently possible.
JARGON BUSTER BOX
Tel: 020 8680 1668 All Rights Reserved. Site Map. Copyright © 2000-2010 Mysterious Ways.