Part of the visual impact of the CDTV Title Screen is the captivating animation of the three rotating CDTV logos. You would be forgiven for thinking that this animation was made with 3D software. These letters were actually made by hand, then rotated and photographed, imported into an Amiga, cleaned up, and turned into the animation you see on the Title Screen and in the CDTV screen saver. Read on to learn about this intriguing piece of CDTV history!
Limitation breeds creativity, the saying goes, and the CDTV title screen is a classic example of this. Creatively speaking it is both an artistic and a technical achievement, and CDTV Land will be showing you why, as we uncover how this intriguing artifact of Commodore history came to be and how it works under the hood.
Arrr, matey! The Secret of Monkey Island gets the CDTV Land treatment. In the first of what will be an on-going series of CDTV-specific improvements for this game, this unofficial and unlicensed fan release allows you to play and save the game on a CDTV player without a CDTV keyboard. You only need a floppy drive and your standard CDTV remote controller. It also allows you to run the game in 60Hz mode and removes the copy protection screen at the start of the game. Shiver me timbers! Continue reading “Secret of Monkey Island for CDTV”
To upgrade your CDTV player to the latest and greatest CDTV OS version 2.35 you normally need to open up your CDTV player, remove the original ROMs and install the new ROMs. But what if there were an easier way to upgrade your CDTV player to 2.35 without even opening it? Well, if you happen to own one of those elusive CDTV memory cards, now you can!
Continue reading “CDTV OS 2.35 for Memory Cards”
The A570 CD-ROM drive is a fascinating part of Commodore’s legacy, as it is inextricably linked with CDTV: it makes the A500 compatible with CDTV titles. The original CD1000 CDTV player turned out to be an unmitigated disaster for Commodore with approximately just 80,000 units manufactured and Commodore hardly being able to sell them. So how did the A570 fare in comparison, and how many units did Commodore make? And what’s up with that A690 drive? Join me for another excursion into the fascinating world of Commodore’s CDTV history! Continue reading “How Many A690/A570 Drives Did Commodore Make?”
The merciless price slashing that Commodore employed on their ill-fated CDTV line in the early 1990s is the stuff of legends. I decided to take a closer look at how CDTV retail prices developed during those turbulent years and try to place the price cuts in a historical context.
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!
The 6500/1 (marked as 252609-02) and the LC6554H are two microcontrollers inside the CD-1000 that perform several CDTV player hardware specific I/O functions. The ROM code that lives inside these controllers has now finally been dumped and preserved!
An official and CDTV-branded promotional item from Commodore that was announced towards the end of CDTV’s short life, was only offered to CDTV dealers, possibly never even saw a release, and was discovered in 2017 in a barn. Sounds obscure enough? Let’s have a look at the wonderful CDTV Title Display!
When Commodore started selling CDTV in 1991 they were hoping to kickstart a new category of consumer electronics. Sadly, this dream never materialized. While there are no hard numbers on how many units they sold in total worldwide, the estimate based on quotes from various Commodore sales subsidiaries ranges somewhere in the tens of thousands. This begs the question, how many CDTV players did Commodore actually manufacture? Join me and find out!
Continue reading “How many CDTV units did Commodore make?”
