Commodore Amiga 500 CD-ROM (A570) - Oddware 

I worked for the company that made Super Games Pak. I'm amazed to see that you have an original copy of it.

Just found this. Better late than never. I have one of these. All the time I used it, I never realized it could be switched off via the switch. Always something more to learn.

Incredible! I never owned one of these, and seeing it in action is mind blowing for an Amiga 500. It really enhanced the system (the audio and most of all the smooth motion video!). I bet it seemed like there was something missing going back to floppy disks after this. I got my hands on.tge demo 9 fingers by space balls in 1994 I was 7 and was impressed. But this is really cool expansion for the a500 great upload

All your videos are oddware m8 ;) But seriosly now, i love the gear you have, you make the best videos for the amiga fans

That's great, it looks like a comically large 3.5" floppy drive. Very cool.

This device was awesome back then, gettign the old Fred Fish, Almathera and CDPD CD's, you spent ages unpacking tons of disks to try out. Happy days. Spent more time on public domain CD's than commercial stuff, i think Sim City and not much else was all i tried on it.

I had the 570 with a SCSI card with connected via cable to PC tower with SCSI hard drives totaling a massive 120mb :) I loved the CD case I've not seen any manufacture do anything like that since.

I got mine for the same price Dan. Sim City never even worked because I had an A500 and not an A500+. I bought it with the CDPD double CD public domain collection. That CD alone made it worth it, I don't think I even bought another Cd for it. Parachute Joust was a hidden gem on that CD

Thank you for being one of the only people who does these retro computer videos with a decent microphone! My ears salute you.

Nice video! Brings back alot of good memories. Took a dig in my basement storage today. After almost 2 hours of sorting stuff I took a look into the last cardboard box. In it I found my A590 CD-ROM Drive. =) ... And... My beloved Trumpcard Harddisk! =) I am a happy camper today. Will try to test it soon. Bought both units new. The A570 was 1995 Swedish krona (176 GBP) in 1993. The Trumpcard was fully kitted. It cost 5341 SEK (471 GBP). Options fitted are 85 mb HDD and 4 mb RAM. The RAM prices were through the roof back in 1992. The RAM cost/mb was 350 SEK (31 GBP). Happy new 2019 everyone! Keep making cool videos. =)

I do love the floppy drive like design that Commodore used, the fact that it looks like a 3.5 inch floppy drive in terms of the disc slot and eject button. There were CD-ROM drives for PCs that used caddies, but they used a motorised ejection system as far as I know, I've not seen a caddy based PC CD-ROM drive with a mechanical ejection system or that looked like a floppy drive. If anyone is aware of one that's designed like that, let me know.

I still have a few caddies for this at home, shame we throw out our A500 and A570 many years ago :-( We got our one Xmas morning also and I believe the following year we got an A500 accelerator that had an 020 and 8MB RAM. Sadly it turned out not to be compatible with the A570 so the accelerator went back...not before my brother and I enjoyed some games of Settlers with full map size and all SFX loaded!

Cool you got this new in the box back then, 99 GBP was a bargeon compared to the initial 399 GBP. I just recently got the A690 "prototype" you mentioned, that was sent out the developers before it was available for the public as the A570. The A690 got a backup battery that is not found in the A570, other differences are the ROM in a burned EPROM, and missing the internal expansion connector. It was beaten up and I got to repair a couple of traces in, but its now working. To bad it got no pass through connector.

I picked up a new old stock A570 on a consumer fair in The Netherlands (HCC Dagen) in the 90s. It came without a power supply but later I managed to get a power supply and remember seeing the CDPlayer screen as you showed etc.. I also had SuperFrog as a CD32 game which is an awesome Amiga game.

This would have been a dream come true for my childhood self! That cd of PD software would have kept me busy for weeks!

Your collection continues to amaze me.

Around the same time here in the USA they sold a full CDTV with warranty via FedEx delivery for $250 direct from Commodore. No doubt A fire sale to make way for the CD32. Used Parnet to connect it as a CDROM drive.

That one game from the bundle had a cycling excerpt from Jerry Goldsmith's soundtrack for the Sean Connery movie Outland and the pixelated photo is from George Pal's When Worlds Collide. Interesting.

Well ahead of its time ..as a A600 kid I never looked at these very tempting now but the prices are crazy ..

Great video, Dan! :) I had this and I bloody loved it! I spent countless weekends trawling through the CDPD disc, keeping lists of the folder numbers of good things in my homework books. I remember my maths teacher being very curious about all the "strange codes" at the back of my maths book. And for many years the only music-system in my room was the A570 and a CD of Queen's A night at the opera (which my sister lent to me on the Christmas day that I got the drive, and she forgot I had it). Happy times. I would suggest you do a follow-up vid, picking random apps and games from CDPD! ;D

Omg I forgot about this device's existence! Thank you for this. I would be interested in a view of the PD software you could get on those CD ROMs

I had one of these for my A500. I used my (486) PC for most of my computer activities but with the A570 I finally had a good purpose for my Amiga: I used it to record audio CD's to video tape on my brand new Hifi VCR. Not for long, though: I just got a job at a company that made CD-i software, and they had one of the first CD recorders. Once I found out how to use that for audio CD recording, I stopped using the A570. It was a bit of a pain in the butt anyway: as long as it was attached, a lot of other stuff wouldn't work. Also I had a memory expansion that also needed the slot on the side, and I had attached a fan to it to keep it cool (otherwise it would stop working), and because the fan was on the side, I couldn't plug the 570 into the RAM expansion.

That model 1 Mega-CD !!! I recently got one which was broken. Had all the caps replaced and now it works amazing. You should do a video for it :))

What a bizarre piece of hardware. I had the A590 HDD attachment for my A500, which made a lot more sense. ~50MB of HDD storage and an extra MB of RAM.

Love those CD addons for early consoles (look at your MegaCD!) and computers like the 500. Never thought to see this thing in action either until just now, obviously YT features a lot of videos but I never really thought about looking for obscure Commodore stuff. Great video anyways, thanks for sharing this.

Not sure why I never owned one. I used to buy a lot PD disks, particularly those that came with music samples on them, like one that had Black Box "Ride on Time" on it. Quite ridiculous, looking back, at how excited in my 20's, I would be at such a disk. To think we spent good money on a disk with about 10 secs of samples on it. Also I remember the Spectrum emulator ones as well, which came on tons of separate disks, with the games on, this would have been amazing for that.

I originally wanted that but kept my 500+ until the cd32 came out. I still think the CD player GUI looks good. I'd still use that today.

Nice piece of technology, weird it was released after the Amiga 500 was discontinued.

Would have been great if it had been made available a couple of years earlier. Amiga started to suffer as games started to have more and more disks. This would have eliminated the unnecessary disk-swapping. Amiga was the first multimedia Computer and CD should have been made pretty much standard as soon as it was technically possible.

I bought an A500 at a show back when they first came out. I think I paid about £200 and it came bundled with CDPD and Sim City. I probably used it about a dozen times then put it in a cupboard. I still have it though. I'll have to see if it still works.

A great overview. Really handy for those Public Domain CD compilations. I had to use my PC at the time and transferring files back to the Amiga was a pain. Did you ever have the EUROSCENE 1 & 2 discs from Almathera Systems Ltd? They were a company formed by Jolyon Ralph of 'Share and Enjoy' fame. He coded the 'Amazing Tunes II' music demo.

I did own the A570... My friend exchange hardware when we were in school in 1994.. Although Commodore seems stupid to release it just after the A500 went out of production, I guess they were targeting the A570 towards existing A500 users, not new A500 users.. which itself, sounds kinda strange anyway. The second theory is someone missed the boat by a month, which probably makes more sense. i.e Everything was probably all finalized, but they just couldn't get it out quick enough, so rather than cancel it before release, which meant they would of wasted more sales, at least they got something back from it.. That is, those existing users. Thank goodness the Amiga 500 was a success then.

How interesting, I figured out how to run CDTV titles in WinUAE (completely overlooked the Chipset Extra option) a few hours ago...

i sometimes wonder why the cd caddy didn't become a stander for like dvd's, blue ray and console games

Hey Dan, Another really interesting video. Thanks for sharing and keep em comming. g

tom baker narrating Barney there.. nice upload cheers

I managed to snag one of these last year in a job lot fully boxed, my A500 doesn't get much use though as I keep my A1200 and A4000 set up. Been meaning to have a play with it though.

Never seen one of these thanks Dan

I have one of these, the eject needs some assistance, but it still plays fine! Didn't realise the volume control can switch it off!

I totally forgot about owning one of these. It must still be in my Mum's loft.

I had a different drive the "Overdrive" which had a cable. Was a bit crappy, the card got unstuck from the rear of the drive so i had to plug it back into the IDE slot from time to time.

Had they did one for ACD, CDTV & CD32 on the A1200 lots of people would have brought the add on and CD32 Pads with it.

Never seen this before, fascinating, ooh, just what you want, a company president introducing a product lololol

They should have put a cdrom drive in the A1200 in '92. It would have changed a lot.

Never seen that before, thanks for showing this!

didn''t knew about that...very strange piece of hardware indeed.now,if there was a cd attachment that could convert an amiga 500 into an amiga cd 32..:P

I have a a570 drive and it won't power ON. Tried another power plug and it didn't help any idea what else I should look for?

That's quite a bit of oddware! Feels like had it made it earlier (and cheaper), it might have had some use :(

Wow, I had one of these, got it for xmas 92, unfortunately my batman pack a500 needed a 'fatter angus' to run everything, but the amiga got damaged in transit to wts electronics that upgraded. It was never really the same after that, first computers at Bradford repaired it but it had random crashes for the rest of its life :-(

Commodore released a pcmcia CD drive for a1200 I do belive and it made the a1200 think it was a cd32. That a570 could take 2meg RAM however hardly any expansions exist. My question is: Will any homebrew be made for it? I'd like to see some with 1meg RAM required (on account the 1 meg in an a500 with a 501 in it), but with some bonuses for those with 2meg (e.g. a500+). You cannot boot an external device e.g. hard-drive from the (if you have it) SCSI expansion.

I would love one (and/or an A590 or similar) but can't afford it :(

was the voice of "a Bun for Barney" the same one that you can find in the beginning of Little Britain?.

I got one back around 1994 for $99 AU. The biggest issue was the lack of a pass through of the expansion port for an A590 Hard Drive. I'd like to know if it could've worked when lashed up to GVP Hard Drive.

WOW!! Just commented on another of your videos, I have one of these. You have rekindled my youth and i may have to setup my A1200 and A500. I do remember the A500 with just 1/2 or 1M of memory coming to a standstill reading that PD CD. I fitted a 1GB HD £300 at the time and copied the CD from the A500 over a parallel cable (many hours) to the A1200's hard drive. Added an FX400 CDROM later which killed the PSU (overload). So i fitted it all into a PC desktop case and added 2 PSU's to power it all. PS i Also have 2 VIC20's although one says VC20? Any idea why it says VC20? Love the video's.

I have one too. A great piece of hardware but unfortunately I dont get to use it due to lack of space.

A very intersting product. Could one create one's own Amiga games compilation on a cd-rom and play them on it?

I reckon most of us Amiga nuts remember this is just wasn't in retail for long enough for many people to buy one.

Dan. An earth strap connected to... nothing? Hahaha you're mad!

Besides changing the KS rom to 1.3, do you need to do any other mods for this to work on an old 1.2 A500 like what I own?

That CDXL video format was indeed a very early example of it's kind, how would you compare it to the earlier sega mega cd fmv codecs?

Nooo, you skipped Bun for Barney. I want to know how that story continues! Could you please record a playthrough of that?

Dan I just purchased a scsi external hard drive and scsi cable. If I connect the cd rom to a Amiga 1200 Via the hard drive port, what else will I need for it to work? Or will it work :) Thanks.

Curious add-on, software kind of reminds me of a mash up of Mega CD and DOS titles. Same sort of limitations as the Mega CD too, doesn't do FMV that well and should have stuck to audio related enhancement with regular Amiga graphics. Commodore, why were you so cray cray? :\

Great review :)

My first cd player was my mega-cd.

I always wanted one but all the second hand ones at car boots were £50 i do have a cdtv though

Did the audio in just work as a pass through, or do you think there was some processing involved that might have altered the sound in some way?

Anyone else notice that the CD-ROM caddy has write protect tabs labeled 'A' and 'B'?

had one of these :)

Is it true that in 1992, CD-ROMs were ignored by computer game developers at the time as computers with no CD-ROM drives had a far larger user base?

It was pretty decent for its time, and definitely could have been exploited a lot better. When you consider what an equivalent "multimedia" 386/486 based PC would have cost back then.... It's a shame Commodore's marketing and management were so poor by this point.

Wow !

You say this CD-ROM drive didn't work with your original Amiga 500 because of the ROM version that it was running, so how were you able to use it back when you first got it? Did you have the CDTV of which you could borrow the ROM chip from? Clearly this CD-ROM drive wasn't exactly marketed very well because Commodore released it after discontinuing the Amiga 500. Did Commodore make CD-ROM drives for later Amiga computers such as the Amiga 600 or Amiga 1200 etc?

Is it possible to use a third-party CD-ROM drive on the Amiga 500?

I have a chance to buy one of these. Do you know if it will work with kickstart 3.1?

Oddly enough, I was just browsing marktplaats.nl (holland's local ebay alternative) for A500's, and there were like 20 of these on there for next to nothing! The caddy's are almost unobtainium though.

Can you make it auto boot Work Bench from hard disk or floppy if the CD thingy is attached?

wow! cool!

Were there any non-commercial titles released for this?

best thing about it is the splashscreen nothing else absolutely nothing

Hey Dan, i sent you a message here on YT last night. Did u read it ?

7:02 How the hell did you get back to the kickstart screen if you didn't do a soft reset? Oh ya, you "accidentally" kicked the power brick briefly :) Now we know why its under the desk.

Is it compatible with cd 32 software?

OK, so they put this out after they'd discontinued the A500... Was the CD drive at least compatible with the A1200 and up?

They spent money like water,that was the problem.

. "Commodore logic", nice sarcasm Dan :) žToo bad A1200 CD32 unit never emerged, with A600 compatibility

commodore logic.

What model Samsung are you using?

TOM BAKER!!!

Review 'Psycho Killer' :) "Eat my Reeboks' freak face!'

it looks like floppy drive

Requires 1.x ROM... Pass.

Is there a Psygnosis' Shadow of the Beast CD version? No? Then this A570 crap is completely useless. Period.