Correction: Jim Brain dumped a different variant of the 6500/1, not the one from the CDTV. The CDTV version was archived another way. Thanks to Mr Guru for the correction. Here's some relevant links: cdtvland.com/2022/06/28/cdtv-6500-and-lc6554h-roms-dumped/ e4aws.silverdr.com/hacks/6500_1/ www.amiga-stuff.com/hardware/6500_1.html
I was the developer of the Xetec CDx system for attaching a CD drive to your Amiga. Later, when CDTV came out, we wanted to give our customers the ability to use these CDTV titles on a stock Amiga system. So we developed emulation versions of the special libraries and software "devices" that the CDTV had over the stock Amiga OS. That worked reasonably well for many CDTV titles (we successfully tested about 45 titles), although I think we encountered a few that didn't work with this emulation. I was fascinated with CD+G at the time, but couldn't make it work with our system because the Chinon CD drive included in our system did not provide software access to the +G data stream. We supported user-supplied drives, too, but I don't recall that we ever found an available SCSI CD drive that supported access to this data. (IIRC, the Matsushita drive in the CDTV was not SCSI.) Funny/sad story about my quest to get +G working: I suspected that these CD drives might indeed provide a way to access the +G stream (and other optional streams also doc'd in the CD "red book") using commands that were just not documented. This was common of SCSI drives at the time -- support the required standard commands and then add "vender unique" command for your internal use or specialty functions. So I wrote a sort of "war games" SCSI scanner that you could point at a drive and it would try every possible SCSI command and log the error returned to help me look for undocumented commands. This tool worked pretty well to uncover commands that the drive supported in some fashion. But then one day I accidentally pointed this tool at the wrong SCSI address -- that of my development hard drive attached to the Amiga! Anyone familiar with SCSI knows that there is a VERY simple command (04 00 00 00 00 00) that performs a low-level format of the drive. Next thing I know my HUGE (for the time) 800 MB development disk is click-click-clicking with the familiar sound of a low-level format. Yikes! How I recovered this drive and the data on it is another long tale that, all these years later, I just chuckle thinking about. Although I did find undocumented SCSI commands in these CD drives, never did I find one that would let me pull the +G stream and convert it to graphics in order to "play" CD+G's on a stock Amiga. I think I even spent some time reverse engineering the Chinon drive's firmware 😲in my quest. Boy, what a nothing burger CD+G turned out to be after all...
@@judgegroovyman I powered off the drive as soon as I realized what was happening. Which left the drive in a zombie state where it thought it wasn't formatted. But I suspected that the data was still there, since low-level formats usually start at the lowest cylinder and progress to the end. And somehow I knew that this drive generally tried to fill the disks from the middle outward (to minimize seek times). But how to convince the drive that it was formatted and let me get at my data?? This was a Fujitsu hard drive and its firmware was in a socketed EPROM😲. So I was able to pull that chip and grab an image of the stock firmware. After much reverse engineering, I found the code that determined if the drive was formatted or not. I modified that code to make it believe it was, and burned that to a new EPROM and popped that in. Voila! My data all appeared again. You can bet that we adopted a better policy of data backup after that incident. (This was, after all, before networking or cloud backups made this process easy)
@@martyflickinger amazing story, I had CDTV with 2mB fast extension but never learned about CD+G, now I am more tech inclined linux user and love to learn this stuff, thanks!
If you open up that Kenwood receiver, you'll likely find an empty space on the circuit board where the Japanese-market version of it was equipped with a C-Quam AM Stereo decoder chip, but the North American version unfortunately omitted it.
Vivid memory of Tom's mom trying to sell my mom and I the CDTV at computer mind. FMV just bedazzled me back then. You can have a whole encyclopedia on one CD! Just think of what a genius you will be in school!
I had the 400-disc version of that Sony CD player, and it felt like the best decision I had ever made at the time. Until, you know, 2-3 years later and I started burning all my CDs to .MP3 finally and started wondering if I would even need a CD player at all in the future. Fortunately retro goodies make everything remain relevant!
I'm a member of the CDTV club since a while back, and it fits right in with my Philips DAC/Receiver/Amplifier, and the monitor on top completes my tower of power. :) The price of it was like a CD player on release, you basically got a computer for free, a no-brainer. It was certainly ahead of its time, not until 1995 did people understand they wanted multimedia for their PCs. In fact, it was like that for most Commodore-Amiga models; they were better than the competition on release date. They should have released full programming information with each model, but that's not why the models didn't succeed. Most models didn't sell to the numbers they deserved because Americans didn't get the Amiga and didn't embrace it. They embraced locked-down cheap consoles with 4$$-expensive games though, and then bought the complete opposite, 4$$-expensive PCs (but only clones) and pirated the crap out of it. No serious hardware or software developer can do anything to combat such madness in consumers.
A ‘non-techie’ relative in 1995 bought a Phillips CDi, similar concept, and at the time I recall saying that a single hi-fi sized tv-connected multi function box would be the future…games, multi-media, internet. That’s what this is. Amiga side for gaming and browsing, when a decent tcp/ip stack became available, and cdtv for multimedia. Ahead of its time I’d say.
I managed to purchase one when I was still 16 or 16 from a pawn broker in Australia for originally 225 but I payed $150 Australian dollars. Mostly I played SimCity using the inbuilt remote but I got hold of an Amiga FDD and keyboard but no mouse. In Australia we got an interactive CDTv Australian encyclopaedia called Tuppyguise which included locally relevant data including pictures and video covering all of the continent and it's flora and fauna. Over the decades most of the region's on the map retained their original indigenous names and many of those names survive to this day even in cases where the longer names were simplified do that westerners could easily pronounce he names. For example Mandgigoorup was simplified to Mandurah. Up meaning near water. So a place near water and Mandurah is beautiful and iconic being girt also by sea, but also a spectacular natural wet lands environment comprising lakes and river systems. My favourite parts included the Tup-tup system of wetlands these days referred to as Tuppy. Still today we love our Tuppy and this has become part of our cultural heritage. Although this often neglected wideness is not fully appreciated for its natural bounty and wonder. These days while it's always there and beautiful, just the day the world is it's often undiscovered nobody ventures far from the mainstream modern world of flashing lights, sealed roads and shopping malls. Yet take a look and Tuppy is there for all to see and wholly unappreciated. But that's just the way of the world. Nature's Tuppy is all around us. We just don't take the time to take a dip and enjoy what's right in front of us.
I hadn't heard of Tuppyguise! Neat that such a product was made for an obscure platform like the CDTV. I know the name Mandurah; I don't think I ever actually visited but we would have driven by or through it a few times on our way from Cottesloe to Busselton to visit some friends when we lived there in 1987. I was just 14 or 15 at the time so I didn't have much agency, and would have been more interested in playing with my computer or going to the arcade given the choice anyway :) If I ever get back to Australia again, I'd certainly try to take in more nature.
The optional keyboard was a standard Amiga keyboard with a special connector for the CDTV that was painted Black... they easily got scratched to see the normal color beneath.
I love my new CDTV and have upgraded the daylights out of it. SCSI, 8 MB RAM, Hard Drive, Keyboard, Mouse & Joystick. Lovely machines. Apparently the audio is superior on the CDTV over other Amiga's due to some extra filters or something on there... I also did several videos on the AGABlaster software that uses CDXL on my channel and have converted several of my videos over to AGABlaster format.
I knew someone who had a CDTV back in the day -- acquired with an insurance payout. The only problem was, the world wasn't ready for it yet. If you just wanted a good computer system for playing games on, or a CD player with pictures, you could get that for less. The CD software was insanely expensive. It would take several years before full multimedia features -- PCM sound cards, 24-bit colour graphics cards and CD-ROM drives -- became inexpensive enough to be standard on all PCs.
Very cool to see the Commodore CDTV get some love on your channel. I started my CDTV journey back in 2011 and done a couple videos on my channel about it. The last couple of years I have tracked down most of the accessories for it. I'm now only missing the black 1084s and the 256KB memory card (I have the 64KB one). Side note, Power Pinball is one of the better games made for the CDTV 🙂
@@override7486 Sure, we all know what the Amiga hardware is capable of doing, however back in 1991 when the CDTV originally was released, they were not doing all the amazing cool things that came later. As a CDTV branded title, as mentioned in my previous "Power Pinball is one of the better games made for the CDTV", I didn't say it was the best ever made for it. I actually prefer Lemmings over Power Pinball LOL. The CDTV was discontinued in 1993 with the launch of the Amiga CD32, so by then they were doing way better games and other software.
CD-ROM drives were pricey in the late 1980s and early 1990's. I remember the magic number for me to jump in (for PC) was $300 and I saw one go on sale for that price at Fry's in 1996. It went for that price pretty regularly in 1997 and then started dropping fast in the next few years. I also remember buying my Amiga 500 for $600 in 1990, so a CDTV at $1000 wasn't out of line, but it wasn't compelling because of the software. Had I seen a bundle that included the disk drive, keyboard and mouse for $1000 and I didn't already have an Amiga 500, I would've bought one.
Oh hey, I recognize the name Leo Schwab! He runs a RU-vid channel under his alias Ewhac, after leaving Commodore’s Amiga division he became one of the earliest employees of what would be The 3DO Company, doing one of its first games, Escape from Monster Manor. Very kind person, highly recommend checking out his 3DO videos sometime
I wonder if anyone ever paid full retail for Grollier's? In my experience it always seemed to be part of a "...and $500+ worth of software included" bundles
- Great episode, everything here was new to me :) - If I can show my autistic side for a moment, there's a bug in the Bach fugue. At 33:02, an F plays in the top voice (it gets drawn at 33:03). It's the first note in the measure on the top stave, and it needs a sharp accidental. - 37:55 You should totally do a spoken word album with fellow Canadian Shatner.
I usually don't care for these crazy niche audio products, but that Sony is brilliant! I never had more than about 100 CD's so I could just store all of them permanently in that beast.
I recognise the beige caddy being from the Amiga A570 drive. I used to love playing the CDTV version of Xenon 2: Megablast. Shame they never released many games for it. I moved on to the A1200 and then a CD32 that I bought when they discontinued it. I remember it was £199 from Tandy.
Picked up my first CDTV around '92 when our local Amiga dealer was blowing them out for $99 since they had flopped in the market. It made a great companion to my Amiga 500 since with a special parallel port cable and drivers you could connect both machines and load software from one to the other. Sadly I sold that CDTV on eBay about a decade ago as I really wasn't using it once CDs were no longer en vogue. Got my current CDTV a year or two ago and although the CD-ROM drive is broken (and I'm not about to dig down through the innards to replace the faulty capacitors that are most likely causing the problem) I have fallen in love with it all over again.
Maaaan, I LUSTED for a CDTV when they first came out after watching the 'planetside' demo on it. It was just before I gave in to the Dark Side and sold my Amiga 500 with 20mb HD (3rd party, the noisiest damn thing you ever heard) to finance my first PC, a 386DX-40Mhz based clone with 4mb, 105mb internal HD, SVGA and SoundBlaster which sadly left my beloved Amiga in the dust. Commodore's R&D being gutted by Medhi Ali, they just couldn't keep up. The CD32 might have kept Commie alive for a while longer had they been able to manufacture enough to meet demand, but sadly they were swirling the drain by the time the AGA machines came out and the AAA chipset was never more then a dream, though it would have made Amiga machines comperable to the Saturn and PlayStation had it ever been completed.
Front Line Assembly - Plasticity had a data track that if you put into a PC had a music video with an AVI file extension. FLA is a Vancouver based band :)
In the 1990s, I had an Amiga 500 that I got from a roommate, and I eventually bought an Amiga A570 CD-ROM drive that plugged into the side, and that made it into a CDTV. I think the terrible pinball game came with the A570. I don't think I used it much but the Audio CD player was perfect to record CD's onto my hifi VCR -- my VCR refused to record audio if there want any video signal to go with it. I have a tape somewhere with 10 hours* of music recorded from it. *(In the late 1990s, in Europe, there were E300 VHS tapes with 5 hours of SP play time, 10 hours LP. Europe didn't have the SLP speed on VHS but I guess those long tapes eventually made up for it).
I loved my CDTV , I bought it for 30.00 uk , it had two external disk drives and a small hard drive , it was very cool , I sold my A500 when I got the CDTV
I recently threw the lowest device - the 300x CD changer - away. Was great thing back then. Had even a bidirectional remote with text capabilities. Today a single micro SD card holds all these CDs.
Never had an opportunity to own a C= CDTV so really enjoyed seeing one and its capabilities. Always wanted one but just never fit my late 20s budget and since I had an Amiga 500, seemed redundant at the time.
Great video Robin. Nice to the CDTV in some detail. That Power Pinball is almost embarrassing. It doesn’t seem all that much better than some Commodore 64 pinball. There were much better Amiga pinball games for sure. This is meant to play from a CD ROM that could hold 650MB of data and displays on your TV, yet it takes maybe half the screen and the graphics are weak. For a storage media that holds something like 700 times more data than an Amiga floppy they should have done a lot better. Definitely interesting. That $300 Encyclopedia would be $592 today. Ouch!
even more insulting is that 300$ Encyclopedia came bundled with every pc that came with a CD rom (with updates for video and audio) only a couple years later, and by 1996 you couldn't give away new copies for free at our checkout counter
So, I was playing around with INPUTS in BASIC to see if i could trigger the same float behavior you showed before where the rounding starts to get janky - i happened to accidentally press "Return" without entering anything for the INPUT and i was surprised to see that it appeared to just process the last value (-0.01) i entered without having typed anything. If this is a feature of INPUT it might be cool to do a video on that (if you haven't already) 😁
Great video! I heard of the CDTV but never saw it in action... I had the Sony CD changer as well. It supported CD TEXT but only a handful of commercial CDs supported it. So I ended up copying all of my CDs to include that info...
💪😎🔥🔥🔥 The devices from this video are really great! You should prepare more videos about them! Although I know how easy it's to say "you should prepare" and how much effort it requires to prepare 40 min video. In fact I don't have even a single one so long but making 20-25 video is terribly time consuming (at least for me) when wanting to make it well. Still big thank you for this video! 💪😎🔥🔥🔥
I had one, but I'd forgotten most of it. I'm pretty sure I just used it as a CD player, already owned amiga. I think I bought it second hand. Thanks for the memories
I loved mine, although to be honest it was mainly used as a cool audio CD player in the living room. Only thing that stopped me using it more was the caddys. I hated using them, and they seemed antiquated even when the CDTV was new.
A very cool and informative review of a very cool computer. The CDTV looks great! It looks even greater with all the matching black peripherals like a black Commodore Monitor, Keyboard, floppy-drive etc... Comes after my black commodore plus/4 setup. Thank you for sharing!
1:23 Oh, they go sideways. I was thinking less than 100 would stack in a space that tall. Looks like the different light colors mean a different hundred. 7:46 Seems to be saying it's going to destroy your CD with a high-powered laser! 8:37 You only need a Reset button if you expect your product to crash a lot! 13:07 Geez, a caddy. Weren't trays common on CD players by this time? 20:21 Teledon lives! I guess this is bitmapped. 22:30 If the bitmap filled from left-to-right, you could read the first line of text as it goes. 24:30 Movies might be less "juddery" if they could manage 12 frames per second. 37:47 I want Techmoan to make a music video for his "Take It Off" song! 37:57 Maximum Reverb!
Looks like my dad's theater room from the 80's! He had all the latest CD and Laserdisc stuff as soon as it came out, even if the first players did cost around $1,500. Yeah, just a plain CD player cost as much as a CDTV when the tech was brand new. I still have his 101-disc rotary player, among a couple dozen other machines and receivers. I remember going to the World of Commodore show (either Pennsylvania or New York, I don't remember where). The CDTV was brand new and they had demo units everywhere. I had no clue why anyone would buy one.
I see this sort of thing too often! You'd think they would proof-read, then proof-read again with these things, especially given that they weren't exactly "budget priced".
I still have my CDTV, keyboard, and floppy drive somewhere. I hope it didn't have a leaking battery onboard. I'm just getting back into my older hardware. I picked up a squarish formatVGA LCD at Goodwill for $4.75. lol. Now to choose a display adaptor option for 23 pin to VGA. The CDTV always occupied a spot next to my stereo rack, with a 1702 monitor running composite. The mouse was horrible though. God I love the CD interface. One CD+G I had on accident was Jimi Hendrix Smash Experience. Kinda cool! INSOC CD looks a bit cooler I think. Hopefully I can find one.
nice... In my CDTV stack, I have....(well 2 stacks - All Sony) LBT-950D on the left. then on the right stack, starting at the bottom...DVP-CX850 (200 disc DVD), MDP-850D (Laser Disc), SLV-E80 (VHS), STR-DB930 (amp), Amiga 3000 in black Checkmate 1500 Plus case, CDTV, and at the top, DTC-690 (DAT)
Thank you for reviewing the CDTV. What an awesome device. It's a shame izlt didn't sell. The vision was great, the price to high, most software to poor...
This motivates me to dust off my CDTV. It needs repair but since it’s a complete set with the original black monitor, keyboard, mouse and floppy drive as well as a couple of expansions boards inside it’s worth the effort 👍🏾
From the release of the Vic-20 in the early 80's to one of its last products released, this CDTV in the early mid 90's to me there was an overkill of products from Commodore! All the variations and derivatives of the Commodore 64. All the versions of the Amiga. The Commodore PC clones. The peripherals. It just seemed like every few months there was a new Commodore computer being released. Some of the products were not significantly different than existing ones. Of course at the same time there was the rise of the PC clones and Apple!
12:44 You'd think that, for that price, they would at least supply it in a caddy of its own. It would be more convenient and, importantly, help to keep the disc safe from dust, fingerprints, scratches etc.. I guess Tomorrow's World (BBC, early 1980s) wouldn't have spread jam on THIS particular one had these been out back then!
The CDTV is such a beautiful machine. I really wish I could find one but they have really become unobtainium. Really wish I could find a full set. :) That pinball game was OK... but it's no Pinball Dreams/Illusions. I do appreciate getting Bach's Fugue in G minor. Love that piece that I first heard in Ahoy's documentary on trackers. Also, RMC did an interview with Gail Wellington about the CDTV which was also very interesting.
Amiga show and tell, beautiful!! Do more, u could make a fork of your video genre as do 10marc with chickenhead chronicles, u could call these videos series"16 bit incursions" or something
Why do I find the CDTV to be Commodore's take on the Philips CD-i? Both, of course, failed because of the lack of decent software. 18:47 That CD could take the full advantage of both the Commodore CDTV and the Philips CD-i.
MIDI in/out as standard was sorely missed on the A500 - what an odd choice and even odder they didn't add it to the 1200 - especially since the Atari ST was eating the Amiga's lunch in the MIDI world!
Set top boxes in 2000 were reconstituted SGI's so the Amiga would have been to 1991 what the SGI was to 2000. Amazing how much video they could push through through hole .1in pitch DIPs.
Man that pinball game is _crusty_. Looks like a 256 color version of pinball construction set. Could've easily fit on a floppy probably. Kinda just not even notable enough for any sort of shovelware showcase. :p It is a lot like an American company though to charge a lot for outdated tech, especially back then. Commodore and Atari were really cut from the same cloth in a lot of ways and just basically stopped innovating in the 80s while everyone else pushed ahead. A lot like the auto industry was/is.
I actually had one of the first Commodore CDTV along with the black keyboard and external drive when it was released here in Sweden. I thought I would be able to do so much more cool stuff then I could on my Amiga 500 but it was just a lot of cash for a thing that sadly did not live up to the hype.
The INSOC CD takes me back. I had a NEC Turbo Duo in the 90s that could play CD+G discs. I had this INSOC CD (as well as their other albums) and I also had "Naked" by the Talking Heads and "Silvertone" by Chris Isaak which were both CD+G albums but neither of them had graphics that were as interesting as the INSOC CD. I thought it was a shame that there weren't more CD+G discs released and I think the format may have had wider acceptance if the Sega Saturn or Sony PlayStation would have supported CD+G. Most of the early CD based game consoles (TG-16 CD/Turbo Duo, Sega CD, Jaguar CD, 3DO, Phllips CD-I & Commodore CDTV) could play CD+G natively but none of them had true mass market appeal as later optical based consoles did.
I actually bought a Sony CX455 (which holds 400 CDs), and then I bought another one, and then I bought a CX70ES (which holds 200 more & plays in "enhanced standard"). You can link the CD changers together and put them into a Jukebox mode that plays one track from one CD on the first unit, and while that's playing it'll select another disc on the second unit, and when the first song ends the second one starts immediately. The link is 1/8" mono patch cord between the units, I don't know how many you can daisy-chain like this. (Obviously doesn't hold as much music as a 120 GB iPod, but hey).
I owned a CDTV. It was a present I think. I hardly used it. I used the software I owned for it more on the CD32, but that was mainly because the CD32 hardly had any native software. Both ridiculous and pointless devices really.
I’m sure you have plenty of video ideas, but it would be neat to do a “hello world” tutorial for assembly and basic. It’s surprising that there are no hello world tutorials for turbo macro pro out there, and maybe 3 total for the Commodore, all in machine language.
this was fun to watch! That stack needs a caraoke mixer, a sony turntable and a laserdisk as well as a minidisk. I got one of the next model up from that kenwood. It supports prologic and dts I think. It is a fun beast of a reciever to listen to. What speakers are you running? I run klipsch kg2s in my bedroom.
Very Cool. I knew 1 person that had one back in the day but he didn't keep it long. Oh what could have been... Interesting about the CD+MIDI. CD+G discs I have quite a few of and can play them on a SegaCD, Saturn, TurboDuo and I think that is about it for what I have to play them. I have a CD+MIDI+GRAPHICS classical CD that also came with a floppy disk with Mac Software in Hypercard format. I have not been able to play the MIDI parts.
5:52 If someone with the unusual name of Door Commodore and holding the naval rank of commodore owned one of these, and we employ the "surname, first name" convention, we could designate it the "commodore Commodore comma Door Commodore Commodore Commodore Dynamic Total Vision." Now we're approaching "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" territory!
4:55 Slipstream.. urg ;-) 10:40 American, that’s strange. I kinda want to do a diff American English on that thing now. 12:28 I’ve captured your famous “oh” sound bite and made it my terminal bell sound. For science. 34:30 SOOOO many bits 34:57 4 bits > than 16/32 bits. Much better.
Yes, those 4-bit chips were very common in any application that needed a lot of I/O to run their displays like LED / LCD / VFD. I did a video about "4-Bit Video games" showing a bunch of electronic games by Tomy that also used similar 4-bit microcontrollers and explain a bit more about it there.
great video, as always. do you think the additional micro controllers for input increase latency in some way for example for mouse input? i am a latency wh*re - even ps2 or usb to db9 converters bug me when using a crt. cheerz mate
