I was an Amiga fan, and I picked up a CD32. And I have the distinction of owning a very rare NTSC Amiga CD32, since I live in Canada (and Canada was the ONLY non-PAL market the device was ever released in!). I still have it. :-)
@@Dexter_GamingYTRoblox On the CD32? I guess you'd need an Amiga mouse (which it doesn't come with), and it doesn't have a Workbench disc either. Can you confirm we're talking about the same thing?
@@ScrapKing73 old comment, but yep...if you hold both mouse buttons down on the CD32 you get the same menu as the A1200, so you can disable-cache etc for compatibility. I've got a french one with an RGB out on the board, works really nicely with modern screens.
The curious thing is that CD32 was very popular in Poland - even after it has been replaced in the western market. Around 1994-1996 there was a still some amount of software still available for this console usually imported from UK, Germany etc. CD32 is still in many hearts of Polish amiga fans as great solution for Amiga Games experience and prices of this machine year by year getting higher value. Amazing!
@@kordelas2514 Yes A500 was the most popular but after bankruptcy of the Commodore sales of A1200 was marginal in Poland unlike CD32. Even CD32 software sales overcome PC CD-ROM sales in 1994. Check old polish computer magazines.
Commodore had a brilliant team of passionate engineers at the forefront of home computer innovation, too bad they didn't have the senior leadership they deserved. The C64 still has the guinness record of most sold computer of all time.
I owned a CD32 with keyboard and mouse and i must say i was not disappointed after selling my Amiga 500 to buy it with was my first real console from owning a c64 previous, But Sega did have the last laugh in my world as i purchased the Dreamcast and that blew me away with 4 pads and 2 light guns my house was always full some fun nights in with mates and online with Phantasy Star v2.....happy times
I imagine an alternate reality where Commodore didn't make a bunch of financial missteps and remained a huge competitor with Nintendo, and Sega didn't make the absolutely devastating decision to add all those peripherals to the the Genesis/Mega Drive and absolutely didn't have garbage architecture in the Saturn. The gaming industry would have benefitted from having those companies stay strong. Oh well.
i wonder what pleasance is talking about, since a) there was no additional power the cd32 boasted (apart from one chip and a cd drive) b) there was no developers making anything other than awful "ports" of existing amiga games. Nothing show off its capabilities, maybe Microcosm at a push. launch titles were a mess, actually I bought and loved the CD32 (only sold last yr) but it didnt ever seem like anything even more than the A1200 after xmas and boxing day was over. Also I doubt a devkit was more than adding a CD drive to an amiga lol, Id love to see one though. I did release a CD32 game in the end but my startup-seq was buggered and it did not run without a floppy that came in the box LOL.
The Amiga CD32 sucked. It sucked not because it was a bad console per se, but because it was a terrible Amiga. It had no keyboard, mouse, floppy drive or hard disk, things that could only be added through expensive after market peripherals. So it was useless to existing Amiga owners and incompatible with all the games they already had. I also suspect that many Amiga owners saw it as the writing on the wall for their platform, that Commodore had decided their future was consoles. And for non-Amiga users, the system didn't get many games and certainly not recognizable licensed games compared to Sega or Nintendo systems. Also comparing to Sega is damning it with faint praise since Sega just had deeper pockets so their failure was more drawn out but it was still a failure.
One bad decision ruined a potentially viable console. The games on cd32 weren't even as impressive as mega drive and certainly not snes. Such a shame :/
i brought this new and thought to myself there was no difference to my 1200 so i sold it pretty quickly after if they had 3d titles for it better ones would have been good but it sucked like all amigas at 3d thats why the PlayStation killed all the amiga and other consoles for me was afar superior machine at 3d. i mean gran turismo fifa wowwww amiga could never do it.
All I ever hear from Brits are how good the Amiga is and how good the ZX Spectrum is. But the Spectrum had like 5 colours max and the CD 32 couldn't perform better than a 16 Bit system. I am thoroughly confused by this... maybe we just had different standards in North America (I'm Canadian, for context). Either way, the CD 32 seemed like an absolute failure regardless of their attempts at mocking Sega. I mean they went bankrupt within a year of putting up said billboard and Sega's still making games sooo, yeah. I think Sega came out ahead on that one.
I don't think anyone's pretending the Spectrum was the best computer available. It's almost legendary because it was relatively cheap, accessible and well supported. It is the computer a whole generation of early enthusiasts learned on. The Spectrum was wildly successful in the UK and Europe.
I think with time and developer proficiency, the Amiga cd 32 could have competed with the mega cd but not the 32x. As an Amiga nerd since the 80s I had one as an ersatz Amiga 1200. There was a chip for 3d in the cd32 that was underutilized and not all that impressive when it was... But it could have done some super scalar games with some ingenuity.
The Akiko chip. This and Kickstart/Workbench 3.1 were the main reason the Amiga 1200 and 4000 couldn't play CD32 games. It was a shame that Commodore didn't think to add these chips to the AGA computers either directly or through a CD Rom attachment to allow them to play those games, it might have expanded their audience. I had an A1200 (still do actually) and gave it the typical upgrades: 68030 trapdoor expansion card, with more Ram, and a SCSI port attachment. I had further expansion through the PCM_CIA Port as well. I used it mainly for graphics and animation, with a game or two every now and then. A friend had the Amiga 4000 and used it mainly for video production with the Video Toaster.
@@lazarushernandez5827 They did actually plan to do just that, there's even at least one of the prototype CD drives kicking around. But thanks Ali's Mehddling Commodore went bankrupt before it could go into production.
It COULD have humiliated almost any videogame from that time if Commodore simply had put another 2 Mbytes RAM, which would make it at least 80% faster, and, perhaps a real 68020 instead of the cheap EC version... So many things commodore did wrong by the time... Not releasing an Amiga 1300, 1400, 1600 with 030, 040, 060 chips, not allowing the users to easily add more RAM using regular ram modules... Not adding a standard VGA output to allow us to use cheap vga displays... Even moving from Motorola to Intel would be an obvious choice by 1991 already, so much more powerful... But above all, the CD32 software lineup was pitiful... In fact, no real AGA game were ever released back then... even for the 1200 to take any advantage of it.
My fav console of all time! Still have mine with 030 addon and extra fast ram. Poland was the 3 rd Amiga market after Germany and Uk. Amiga in general was and still is loved here. It was in use even after the 2000.
As an American girl gamer. I didn't know about the "To be this good will take Sega ages" thing. But OMG that does have a nice ring to it. Pure genious hahahahahaha!
It wasn't until nearly 10 years ago that I knew the Amiga CD32 even existed. We didn't get that console in America due to a patent violation. But I never imagined Commodore humiliating Sega at all.
I remember wanting one and going to save my money for it, but by the time I had enough the console had stopped being sold and I never knew why until years later and hearing about the bankruptcy and a shortage of units being made. For the best really, because the main game I wanted was the pinball title and turns out I didn't even like it when I finally did play it. Still, what could have been had they kept going. Things like Super Stardust would have been appealing back then.
What I find amusing about both companies is that you had both head offices that were trying their best to mess everything up, in this case, Commodore US and Sega of Japan, whereas the European division of Commodore were doing alright and had some better ideas than the head office in the US, whereas on the Sega side, it was Sega of Japan that were messing up whiles the US division was doing alright. Unfortunately for both companies, the ones that were doing better got overruled by the money men at the top that were messing up, they were lacking vision and felt more like accountants than into the tech side of things. I do wonder where both companies would be today if the divisions that were doing well, had the powers to take the companies forward on decision-making, could Commodore have been like Apple or a big PC parts player today? Could Sega have a games console on the market today? There's no way to know for sure, the market back then was very competitive and a lot were changing over a short space of time, but then, nobody ever thought Apple would be where they are now and Sega had ever chance of being in the console business just like Nintendo are still in. Another irony about both companies is how both were trying to extend the life of the existing machines, Commodore with A500+, A600 and to a less degree, A1200 whereas Sega were doing it with Mega CD and 32X add-ons, both companies should have focused on truly next gen hardware and not reshuffling the same hardware stack. Now to be fair to Commodore, the A1200 was new hardware, but I found that the uplift in performance was quite weak and should have been released about 2 years earlier with better specs then the A1200 had, basically, the A1200 should have blown away both the SNES and Mega Drive in more or less every area but clearly it didn't, there were weaknesses in many areas, much of the blame is Commodore US. On the Sega side, they made the mistake in trying to extend the life of the Mega Drive with add-ons, where really they should have focused on a new gen earlier, this is a lot of resources going on projects that do little to push the companies forward, in the case of Commodore, the A500+, A600 and to a less degree, A1200 which should have been a bigger upgrade over what it was, on the Sega side, Mega CD and 32X, all the resources being thrown in these areas when focusing on next gen hardware would have had a far bigger impact on them and consumers.
All that supposed support from developers and retailers. Hmm..... strange it amounted to ...... all. Mega CD didn't sell because it was expensive in the UK. CD32 wasn't a success either. Nor 3D0, CDi, Neo Geo CD, FM Towns Marty. None of those systems did much globally. And we can add the Jag and it's CD add on to that list. Playstation kicked off the CD era along with Saturn. But yeah. Big win...
Ahhhh The maths battles of consoles in the 90's..... Brilliant haha. You had the Mega Drive and Mega CD combined, and Sega lovers said ''It's the first 32Bit console'' Amiga then released the Amiga CD32 and Amiga lovers said ''The Mega CD isn't 32Bit, it's two consoles at 16Bit combined'' Atari Jaguar released their console and the Atari lovers said ''You 32Bit peasants, lick my boots, Jaguar is 64Bits, you do the math'' Yet all three were proper sh#t lol...... I mean they were so s##t they were great, but none of them worked as advertised. All the games looked the same as the base cartridge version, just maybe with smoother rendering and better sound.
I bought one at the time, looking back though it really wasn't the step it needed to be. Commodore should still be here today, really sad what happened
Well I didn't see that coming , at the time I had a few mates with a Sega MegaCD and only 1 who bought a Amiga CD32 and only played a football manager game on it. It wasn't a good system. I do like the billboard 😂 genius. There is a moral to the story about bragging though seeing as Commodore went bust and Sega carried on and definitely got the last laugh on that front. I personally just bought a Snes to accompany my Megadrive at the time as I wasn't impressed by the games on any of the CD upgrades until the Playstation arrived years later.
I've fond memories of this console. My introduction to point-n-click games with full voice acting (talkie); Simon The Sorcerer, Beneath a Steel Sky, Darkseed... As we didn't yet have a CD drive on the PC. Diggers, Morph, Oscar, Chaos Engine, Super Skidmarks, Alien Breed, Banshee, Microcosm, Arabian Nights... The best feature of this console was the poor quality CD enclosure. That failed within a year. Leaving me having to put a stack of Yellow Pages and Littlewoods catalogues on top of the CD lid, in order for disks to spin. Not to mention the D-Pad falling off the awkwardly shaped controller. Stuck back on with plenty of insulation tape (luckily, my Megadrive controllers would also work on the console). Fun times.
I liked my sega cd but was always underwhelmed with the games and felt sega missed lots of huge opportunities to really make they cd shine. I would have loved re-releases of genesis games with cd quality audio and collection sets. Possibly upgrading the graphics as well to some of the arcade ports since storage capacity wasn't an issue with the cd. As it is the only game I owned at the time I actually enjoyed was sonic cd and liked how well sewershark looked but got boring quickly.
As an American, the only thing I knew about the Amiga CD 32 is that it had a weird controller and barely moved anything in the my region. I learned a lot today about Sega having the tables turned on them, which also warms my heart as a Nintendo kid growing up.
I always have had and will always have a soft spot for Commodore Amiga. Never had the Amiga CD 32, I had the 600. Still the fact that they were able to get one over Sega even if it was for only a little while makes my retro heart jiggle with delight.
I remember my Dad taking a 600 and several floppy disk boxes of pirated games home that he’d bought from a colleague for me. I’d been playing on my mega drive beforehand, but it was sold in the same month. Probably some of my happiest gaming memories. Alien breed tower assault… 🥹
Wow, Lady Decade, you are absolutely on fire !!! You keep releasing video after video, at a crazy pace. And these aren't just some dumb, effortless react videos, these videos require a shit ton of research to make. I guess that's the meaning of the word 'devotion' .
