CDTV OS 2.35 for A570

CDTV owners around the world have been enjoying the benefits of CDTV OS 2.35 for a while now. Today I am delighted to be able to announce the availability of 2.35 for the A570 CD-ROM drive! Yes, all the improvements that CDTV OS 2.35 offers have now come to the A570: support for 68030 accelerators, support for 32-bit Fast RAM, HDD boot delay option, the ability to boot your A500 from any Amiga CD-ROM (not just from CDTV Titles) and more!

It’s finally here! 2.35 for your A570!

What Is CDTV OS 2.35?

CDTV OS 2.35 is the first proper (but still unofficial) update since 1992 to the CDTV OS ROMs that are inside each CDTV player and A570 CD-ROM drive. It’s a labor of love that I have been working on for more than a year now. You can read more in-depth about CDTV OS 2.35 here.

A570 with the mighty CDTV 2.35 OS ROM installed

Nostalgia

Bringing CDTV OS 2.35 to the A570 was personally very satisfying to me, because although I never owned a CDTV player back in the 1990s when I was a teenager, I did buy an A570 when it was being sold for bargain prices. It was the coolest upgrade I ever bought, because it turned my A500 into a CDTV player! Seeing the CDTV title screen with the spinning logo in person on my own A500 for the first time is a moment I still remember to this day.

My A570 running CDTV OS 2.35 on my A500

My A570 came with the 17-Bit Public Domain double CD-ROM, which was an absolute treasure. I have such fond memories of late summer nights in the 1990s checking out PD demos, games, utilities or just playing Audio CDs with my A500! It was a blast, and is one of the reasons why the A570 is so near and dear to me. (I’m a sucker for nostalgia)

Three for Three

Releasing separate ROM builds of 2.35 for the CDTV player, the A570 and the A690 drive was part of the plan all along back when I started this unholy endeavor many moons ago. As I have tried to illustrate in this article on the 2.7 and 2.30 ROMs, these three devices are not 100% identical and neither should their ROMs be! With the release of 2.35 for A570 (and 2.35 for A690) it will mark the first time in history that a single CDTV OS ROM version is publically available for each of these devices with proper build parameters for each respective device, so all the hardware of each device is fully supported.

Give your A570 a tune up with the fresh new 2.35 ROM!

Each of these three ROM builds have been carefully tuned exactly the way they need to be for the CD1000, the A570 and the A690, and they also finally add support for systems with 68030 accelerators and 32-bit Fast RAM. It’s a milestone that cleans up a lot of the messy past and paves the way for an even brighter future for all three of these Commodore devices!

TF536 Support

The TF536 from TerribleFire is arguably the best 68030-based accelerator out there for the A500, and a personal favorite of mine. It’s a perfect fit for CDTV players, because with the proper relocator board it fits inside the CD1000 with the lid closed. Releasing 2.35 for the A570 so that it would make the drive compatible with A500s with a TF536 inside was eagerly awaited by many Amiga users. The release took a while longer than originally envisaged, because there were some minor compatibility issues with TF536 and the A570’s bookmark memory. Thankfully once the issue was narrowed down Stephen Leary (a.k.a. TerribleFire) released a new firmware for the TF536 in no time which solved this issue. So if you plan to use your TF536 equipped A500 with an A570 you need to upgrade your A570 to CDTV OS 2.35 and flash your TF536 with the newest CDTV specific firmware.^[1]

Working CD-ROM drive with TF536 and A570!

Patch ahoy!

Because legal proceedings are still on-going in the world of Amiga, CDTV OS 2.35 can only be distributed in patch form right now.  You can get it at my GitHub page here. Although the current patch procedure is pretty technical in nature, patching and burning your own EPROMs requires a certain level of technical competence from the end user to begin with, and thankfully it hasn’t stopped CDTV OS 2.35 from spreading to most CDTV owners who want it. Maybe there will come a day that it will be easier for owners of CDTV players and A570/A690 CD-ROM drives to get a hold of CDTV OS 2.35, but until then this is the best I can do without breaking the law.

How Many A570s?

But wait, that’s not all the A570 news I have for you today, because not only did 2.35 drop for the A570, you can now also read a follow-up article to the popular “How Many CDTV Units Did Commodore Make?”. The title of the new article is, you guessed it, “How Many A570/A690 Units Did Commodore Make?” Answer: a whole lot less than the number of CD1000 units!

As with CDTV OS 2.35 for CD1000, the work on 2.35 for A570 and A690 was done with the support and cooperation of many others in the Amiga and CDTV community to whom I owe a debt of gratitude. Special thanks go out to Stephen Leary and all the CDTV Land testers.

So please, warm up your EPROM eraser and programmer and treat your A570 to the flashy new 21st century updated version 2.35 CDTV OS ROM and, while you’re waiting, read up on the history of the A570/A690 and how many units Commodore manufactured in CDTV Land’s new in-depth article.

With compliments from your pals at CDTV Land!

 

Footnotes