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?”
CDTV OS 2.35 is an unofficial, custom update for CDTV. Available now for free as a patch update to the official Commodore 2.30 ROM image. Continue reading “Free CDTV OS 2.35 update out now”
CDTV OS 2.35 is an unofficial, custom update for CDTV, A570 and A690. In this article I will try to answer some questions that have been raised about the technical and legal aspects of CDTV OS 2.35. Continue reading “CDTV OS 2.35: Technical and Legal Stuff”
The publically available versions 2.7 and 2.30 CDTV OS ROMs/Extended ROMs, are often used to upgrade CDTV players. While they do work in a CDTV player, there are some minor incompatibilities CDTV owners need to be aware of. Find out what these problems are and what your options are to avoid them!
Continue reading “Setting the Record Straight on 2.7 and 2.30 CDTV ROMs”
When CDTV launched, a commonly heard complaint from Amiga users was (and still is) that you can’t connect standard Amiga joysticks to the CDTV player. While it does have a joystick port on the back, the connector is different from the 9-pin D-Sub standard. However, as we will see, Commodore had thought of a solution to this problem early in the development process of CDTV in the form of a special brick shaped device…. that ultimately was never released. Or was it?
The world famous Guinness Book of Records makes its first appearance on CDTV: In 1991 CDTV Publishing introduced the Guinness CDTV Disc of Records, containing all Guinness verified world records on a single disc for you to peruse on your TV. But was it any good?
