AMIGA CD32 Story & Review; Inspections | Nostalgia Nerd 

Always seeing CD32, Jaguar, Lynx, 3DO commercials in magazines, while playing MD and SNES awaiting Saturn, 32X, Ultra 64 and PSX... man, it felt like the wild west of video game consoles. Early 90s were cool.

April 1994 ... I became a teenager, and my beloved Commodore and Nirvana were killed off... what a month

I still make mouse and keyboard adapters for this console!

Had Commodore got companies like these on board and started releasing true arcade conversions: Konami, Sega, Namco, Capcom, and Data East. Then I think Amiga CD32 would have been a smashing success.

I inherited my dads CD32 in the mid 90s. He largely used it with an amp and speakers as an audio set up so when I got it, I just used it for music. I don't remember if we had any games for it. The boot up screen music in your video brought back lots of nostalgic feelings. I miss the 90s!

thanks for the video I always remember seeing the cd 32 in magazines, we had an amiga 600 in our house and I loved it despite having to battle with the kids at school who always had the snes or megadrive. in retrospect the amiga was the superior bit of kit :)

"With consoles such as the XBox One NOW"... I feel like a time traveler from the future 😳

Love your channel bro. Awesome content and great depth in your reviews and "way backs" lol. As a 40 year old gamer back to coleco and old Ataris of course, I just eat this shit up! More content!! MOAR MOAR. Also, super J about all your old hardware man.

Nostalgia Nerd Awesome how you combine your technical explanations with board footage, actual magazine ads and everything. Subbed! :)

Good video I sat and watched it all last night on the youtube app on my TV while looking for something, keep it up!

only amiga makes it possible.. i miss amiga :(

Still rocking my CD32

I want to live in the parallel universe that has AMIGAStation 4 now.

excellent look at cd32. Got it on lunch, and hold it close to my heart:)

I would have loved to have had an Amiga 1200 in the CDTV form factor. I still think the CDTV had the coolest looking case of any computing device, ever.

i'm glad you mentioned cd playback functionality, at the time what hifi did tests on the cd32 and the cdtv,as it turned out playback quality was excellent on par with budget high end players, the conclusion was it was worth buying as a cd drive with its game play a bonus, the cdtv had good cd playback too though not as good as the cd32. when the price was slashed buying and using as a cd spinner was a no brainer.

Watching this for the second time over this Christmas period. Great video but at the same time it's great to see how far you've come Sir Nostalgia!!!!!

I like the background music. It sounds exactly like early Level 42!!

Diggers was a good game! :) I owned a cd 32 for yrs and used it as a cd player in my hifi setup. :)

Thank you, a well made video about the amiga cd32, I had the amega 1200 but I did want the cd32!. I would say its the best video about the cd32. Cheers.

This is one of those consoles I really would have liked at the time. Shame Commodore went out of biz after its launch. Still jazzed it had Simon The Sorceror CD on it :)

gods, that intro animation and audio makes me shiver. Fond memories of the CD32 include getting mum to bring it and the TV up into my room when I was too ill to go to school! Jetstrike and Roadkill were my favs

thanks for showing this on a proper recording on a proper screen. when the chaos engine intro kicked in i was slung straight back to childhood by the sound and look

Very informative. I'll probably come back to watch more videos like this.

One day... i've find an Amiga CD32 for my retro collection promise ! thanks for this great music selection ; )

A nostalgia shot from me seeing the CD32 again. My experience of it was a bit odd. By the time I got one, it had pretty much become a dud, the price fell through the floor and you could pick one up really cheap. My memory might be flaky here but I think I got mine from Dixons for £50. I didn't get it as a games console, I got it because it had a CD-ROM drive and getting one of those for the Amiga A1200 was really expensive if anyone remembers back then. You had to get a squirrel scsi interface and an expensive drive that would end up costing around £200. However you could pop a special CD into the CD32 and get it to turn into a little server and have it send anything on a CD onto the A1200's hard drive but over the ancient parallel interface I think It was. Correct me if I'm wrong. Anything I remember it took 4 hours to copy one whole full CD onto hard drive with it. Absolutely awful speed I know but 600mb of data was amazing back then. A couple of Aminet CD's and you were set for months of gaming, demo's and programs to do everything. So I loved my CD32 for the access it gave me to so much stuff pre internet.

I was one of those rare creatures who bought a CD32 at launch. I regularly used it as a CD player in my Hi-Fi and even played games on it. The early 90s was a time when CD players were sexy. In the video Nerd mentions the rear expansion port. I used that port for something called the SX-1 which I ordered from a magazine advert. It basically turned the CD32 into an A1200. It allowed you to plug in mouse, keyboard, floppy drive (I think I used some sort of emulation software to trick the CD32 into saving games onto floppy instead of its tiny internal memory) and........a hard drive. The hard drive I used was a whopping 170MB in size. I installed games onto it such as Monkey Island 2. Favourite games: Frontier Elite II; Theme Park; UFO: Enemy Unknown (the UK name for the original early 90s XCOM game). I also collected a bunch of magazine CDs. Some of them have bizarre voice over on the menu screen.

I had a magazine advertising these and I wanted one very badly. I don't think they ever released it in the US. It was a crazy time in the early 90's with all of these companies releasing crazy powerful hardware with shit software. I remember being amazed at the CD32 and the 3DO.

This weekend I walked into a Retro Games shop in Perth Australia. Just browsing. Got chatting to them about Amiga's and they pipe up "That whole bottom shelf over there was Amiga CD32 gear this morning. One guy came in and brought the whole lot!".

I got one of these back in I think it was 1994, maybe 1995, to go alongside my A1200HD/40... Loved it. Had an A2000, A500, A600 and A4000/040 too... Sadly, I sold them all, and am now looking for an A600 or A1200 to show the kids how good computers used to be, lol

The brainbot exploded out of boredom playing Microcosm! Could have seen that coming, eh scientists?

+Capt Scarlet Thanks for your kind comments! I would reply to your comment, but RU-vid inevitably won't let me. It does make a whole different experience on a CRT, love it! I do need to update my equipment list. BUT you're right, I don't have one the Atari 8 bits. I'm keen to get one when I spy one at a decent price. I was thinking about going for an 800 or 800xl

I still own two real CD32 consoles with different hardware add-ons, and bought nearly all games ever released on it. One of my CD32 consoles is brand new and unused as backup.

To this day Amigas were my favorite machines.. A game console level of user friendliness paired with depth of available non gaming software equivalent to pc

In 1995, I had an Amiga 1200 with an external SCSI CD-ROM; from my PowerMac 6100 (that I bought the year before), a CD 32 with an expansion for keyboard and drives. As well as two CDTV, of one I gifted away to my little brother. I was at that point still ready to affix bayonet, charge the landing force and throw them back into the sea; or at least have a thoroughly good go at it :3 Simon the Sorcerer. I _really_ like the CD 32 version. And Elite 2 would play very well on a CD 32, so I was one happy and sad camper, that held on to the old ways while the old ways crumbled around us all.

That's a fine review man, your system commentaries are amongst the best in RU-vid. I guess, all of these systems (Jaguar, CD 32, 32X, etc.) had some common ground that eventually led to their demise, but for the love of God, I don't understand how one can make so wrong decisions about the freaking gamepad!

I would've wanted one of these as a kid simply because I could play Alien Breed on lol,I was obsessed with that game as a kid and couldn't always play it on the family computer!

My heart skipped a beat as you played simon the sorcerer 😪. Such a great time...

Great review, I may have to visit the great loft in the sky(well the loft anyway) and give it a whirl again this weekend. Just wish I had a CRT to play it on, in it's full glory. Thanks to the internet, there are several compilation cd's that have dozens, nay 100's of a1200/a500 games that run just fine on the cd32. Well worth buying on ebay if you see one at reasonable price for retro gaming.

Greetings from Texas! This is the first video I've seen of yours and I really enjoyed. You have gained one more new subscriber.

I remember the hype around Rise of the robots. Magazines had articles following the development with renders.

This was my last computer, until I switched to a PC in 1995, when the internet came. I also had the sx1 expansion with a 20mb 2,5 HD.

My CD32 had a savegame feature... It couldn't save a great deal, but it had 'slots' a bit like a PS1 memory card. The memory was very limited, but if the battery backup hasn't given up the ghost, I still have savegames for Liberation: Captive 2 and Gunship 2000.

I was lucky enough to own a CD32 shortly after it was released. I loved the machine but the lack of game saves really hurt the machine. I loved the Amiga period and was lucky to have owned A500 , A500+ and an A1200. I look back on my Amiga days with fond memories. I spent many of my teenage nights burning the midnight oil on Amiga games. Happy times and I miss them so much. Love your videos and please keep them coming.

I was a big Amiga player back in the day, and really wanted the company to be a success. What was difficult though, was Amiga (and others) touting the incredible power of their new machines (32 or 64 bit) and, as gamers we see the games and they have versions of Cannon Fodder, or Zool that looked no different to my Amiga 600. It is incredible to think how close Final Fantasy 7 was to this. Fantastic video by the way. I really enjoyed it.

Cool machine twas!

Thank you for your upload sir, you have truly fulfilled your mission, you have truly taken me back to my teenage years and with the spectrum, you truly stirred up my pre teens HORMONES:) PLEASE Keep up the fantastic content as only you know how, if it was not for you my good man I would cancel my youtube PREMIUM!:) Love you channel and I really don`t know how you keep life in perspective while making this fantastic channel, sir! PS I only migrated to the PC after playing DOOM on a DX 486 66 ghz to a 88ghz machine that I personally overclocked:/ I will add your video has broken me and brought back fantasti memory flooding FUN back to me and I thank you :) I would also like to add in this era we had a finite amount of money to spend after PAYING BOARD /booze on friday and saturday night/girls and motorcycles, we were GODS REALLY lol

Great video, love that you’re rocking an Ashens t-shirt.

When I was a kid my dad brought home a magazine all about the upcoming release of the CD32. The magazine really impressed me. I was super excited to try one when they were released. The games looked great and the controller still stands out in my mind. I kept waiting and the machine was never released in US and I never heard anything else about it until I started researching it online a few years later.

Banshee is the best vertical shooter on the amiga. Apidya is the best horizontal shooter.

Diggers is a brilliantly fun game! I've played it a lot on my CD32 but haven't finished it, it does take a while to play though.

My family had an Amiga 500 which we liked for several years, and we thought the CD32 looked good so we got one, but they migrated to the PC after it took over the market as did most of my friends, while I stayed an Amiga fan. I wanted to do things like animation on an Amiga so I saved for years to buy an SX-32 expansion module for the CD32 we still had, which allowed me to add a floppy drive, HD and extra RAM so I could do cartoons with Deluxe Paint 5! I'm still an Amiga fan, although the A1200 I have is secondary to my laptop PC and smartphone, and I still do cartoons now and again!

I had one of these back in 1993-94.

nice Ashens Tshirt

An oldie but a goody here

Never had a chance to really hit it's stride. Shame, but I still love my CD32.

Lovely stuff, subbed. Not my words Nostalgia Nerd, the words of Shaking Stevens.

I remember seeing the CD32 previews next to Sega Saturn, Jaguar, and PSX in gaming magazines. Noble effort, but completely outmatched, even in its day. Shame, I always really liked Amiga as a company. Very forward thinking philosophies.

I remember playing one in Leeds, I liked the pads too! In the end I went for a CD drive for my 1200 by zappo, that with some trickery meant the 1200 could play cd32 games, I had ultimate body blows, arcade pool and a couple of others

The UI for the CD32 Gamer discs was produced by Multi Media Machine Ltd. of Bolton, Lancashire. They also branched into making Amiga-based karaoke machines and quiz night machines, right up until last September when they called in the creditors and the business was liquidated.

Great video keep them coming.

Loved hearing the tunes from some of them games. It brought back great memories. The CD32 and SX-1 expansion was my first 32bit Amiga computer i owned. I always wanted an Amiga 1200 but even a used one with CDrom a fast ram expansion was way too expensive for me. The CD32, SX-1 and 4meg fast ram i purchased was brand new and cost under $1000au and i used this till i saved enough money to purchase my dream A1200 setup which cost around $2500au back then.

The controller buttons were labelled after CD controls. 123 was the shuffle function.

Nice video, covered the gamut. Very entertaining!

I owned a CD32 back in the day as all my friends had Amiga 500/600/1200 and I was always round their houses, playing on their systems and wanted in on the action. (the Amiga music was amazing in comparison to what most people has gaming wise). I was wondering +Nostalgia Nerd, any chance you could capture and upload the music from the cover disc you have? I owned that disc myself and the music takes be back to be 14 again. Cheers.

the competition for the CD32 at the time in the UK was Mega CD, 3DO, 32X, Atari Jaguar, and Neo Geo CD.

Brilliant video!

Commodore did with 32 bits what everyone else did with 16.

I remember buying this from Dixons or maybe Comet when launched. Wish I had kept it.

I pretty sure the CD 32 wasn't released here in the U.S. because Commodore lost patent dispute in U.S. courts. Commodore was barred from releasing the CD 32 in the U.S. until it paid off the person/company that sued them over copyright infringement. Commodore refused or couldn't pay the amount and decided to divert all the U.S. CD 32's to Canada. Anyway... I really enjoyed this video and look forward to watching more.

genius editing work 11:56-12:30

I remember seeing a CD32 in my local Dixons in the Netherlands back in the day. It looked quite interresting. Sadly in retrospect it doesn’t feel like the Mega CD competitor Commodore had wanted it to be. The CD32 may be proper 32 bit, but it hasn’t got scaler hardware and the sound hardware of the Mega CD. Looking at the CD 32 games it feels like there could have been more potential that sadly didn’t come to fruition. I see it more as a 4th gen system, kind of as system roughly comparable to the Mega CD (if you consider the dual cpu setup and the combined MIPS figures of the two 68000’s vs the lower end 68EC020 with it’s 14 mHz clock speed). I really wonder how the CD32 would have panned out if commodore had survived 1994. To me the 32x was an unnecessary move by Sega, the Mega CD was more then good enough sans the colour capabilities. Both the CD 32 and the Mega CD have their own strengths and weaknesses but I would really like to see a sort of technical/philosophical comparison some day, really curious how they compare performance wise.

I played on one of those every Wednesday lunchtime in silica systems (which is the magazine your looking through) in keddies, Southend when it came out. I quite liked it but went for a jaguar!

The younger guy in the CD32 advert looks like Charley from the Darling Buds of May. Legendary swordsman, managing to snare a young (and pre Michael Douglas) Catherine Zeta Jones

That startup is badass

This system... geez. I purchased one on eBay in the late 2000s, because they were readily available at the time. Apparently they were stock from the Philippines that Commodore wasn't allowed to sell in the US because of a copyright dispute, I dunno. Anyway, it's maddeningly hard to find peripherals for this thing, because they're all proprietary and in short supply. I had to build my own power supply from discarded PC parts, because you couldn't get one designed for the Amiga CD32... at least not for a reasonable price. Maybe things are different in Europe, but man, using the CD32 is such a hassle here in the States.

It beggars belief that the makers thought this could compete with the forthcoming PlayStation with the seriously out of date hardware. I owned an Amiga at the time and read Amiga format magazine. Each month they would cheerlead for this machine stating that it was indeed a better choice than the ps1. It was like reading the writings of cult members. Then after release they Actually published a letter of complaint from a reader stating they had rushed out to buy one on day one only to find the shop had no games available whatsoever.

I had a cd32 back in the day and ended up selling it not long after commodore went belly up. I really regret doing that now, though Iam glad that I kept my Amiga 2000, which Iam in the process of getting running after over 20 years in hibernation. I never thought after all this time anyone would be talking about the Amiga. If only commodore had much better people in charge, like Apple and the PC market had we could still have the Amiga. Although I prefer Linux for my OS on my pc, my first love for computers was the Amiga.

Very cool and interesting video. Keep up the good work !

FM Towns Marty was the first 32bit console with CD Rom

Great video. The CD32 was death knell for Commodore, who were already reeling from numerous errors and bad choices. The money and time that was ploughed into R&D for this should've been invested into developing new Amigas. They foolishly chased the console market instead of concentrating on producing computers that could play games and also be used for serious work.

iv still got one of these at my mums lol chaos engine was the shit

I love that game!!

Commodore was obsessed with releasing basically the same products in different configurations over and over.

Ah I had one of these, bought it when it was released, I remember being disappointed with the lack of games

Maybe it was the area I lived, but these early CD consoles were just a non-starter (Canada). I literally didn't know anyone who in 94 didn't have a IBM/IBM Compatible PC with a CDROM so everything they had to offer was way better and way more accessible on a PC. For console gaming... the offerings from Nintendo and Sega were just more fun to play.

The main memory I have of my CD32 was playing XCOM and the main thing I remember from that was waiting...so much waiting. Cover disks were IMO the best part of owning a CD32.

I have fond memories of mine... As I do of my A500 and A1200 (which I've kept pouring love and money into until it became a quasi-A4000T...) I finally sold them in 96 i think... and I regret that terribly. WinUAE is just not the same, I miss the actual hardware... the look, the feel, everything it entailed :(

The problem with the CD32 was that it had no good games.

I forgot how absurdly dramatic video game commercials were in the 90s.

Props to your facial hair, that thing looks classy as all hell

Diggers is a great game! One day I WILL manager to complete it. That Frankenised 32X was hilarious. I've got a CD32, sold my original one many many years ago, and bought another one several years ago. I also like Alien Breed 3D, as slow and awkward as it is, it's still fun, and the aliens brains splat on the wall and fall down when you blow their heads off, no other game does that. If I can get past it crashing, I will finish it.

Man, you've really come a long way.

I want one 030 So far I’m getting a controller cuz it looks cool. And then I’ll slowly work my way up with games .

The CD32 has 1k of NVRAM for saving games, which provides a handful of savestates, and thanks to the Aux port it can be linked up to another Amiga via the serial port so you can backup those savestates, delete them and replace them with new ones, or load old ones back in.

Bad Influence! :o I used to record every episode of that onto Betamax (yes, really. lol), and watch them over-and-over. There's stil nothing like that series on TV now, and I still think a similar program would work for modern gaming. We had things like Games Master as well of course, but that was a completely different beast. btw, if anyone has every episode of Bad Influence in the highest possible quality, I would gladly pay for a full set. I know there are a lot of episodes on RU-vid, but it would be great to get hold of the whole lot. I was also quite addicted to Reboot! back then. Superb series.

CD32 sold well and had over 160 games but was only on the market for 4 months, The lack of fast ram slow down the cd32 and amiga 1200 by 50%

I managed to get one for free and even though I was using a PC then I strangely took to it. The only game I played was Elite Frontier II, I can't remember why I wasn't playing it on my PC, but the reason why I mention it is because you say you couldn't save games. To be able to play Elite II without saving would have been an impossibility, so you must have been able to save games somehow. EDIT 1 KB of memory to save a game too? Wow, those folks at Frontier probably used their procedural generation techniques to compressive saves. Or it was just magik. :D

Oh, looking on your website equipment list, I would suggest you get hold of an Atari 8-bit 400/800/800xl/130xl. They have some of the best cartridge based arcade conversions from the 1980's . Check out classic game room on you tube "Defender" as an example. Much better than the c64 (sid chip apart). The designer for the Atari range of computers went on to design the original Amiga's.

Probably been said. But yes it does have storage for saves. Built in. Boot it without a game and press red.