I love my cd32! If you get a TF330 for it you have a 030 and more RAM you ever need. It boots from CF card and you can store several gigs of games and demos. You can use keyboard, mouse and controllers/joysticks.
Ich hatte 2 mal ein CD32 und hatte viel Spass damit z.b bei Superfrog. Uebrigens das Emerald Mine hatte ich damals auch. Was ich immer sehr mystisch fand war das Labyrinth of Time, was ich aber nie beenden konnte. Müsste es noch als 1 zu1 Kopie irgendwo haben. Klasse weiter so! happy new year!
Best games for the CD32 ? Obviously the multi-disk ones like Simon the Sorcerer, Beneath a Steel Sky, Dark Seed, Big 6 Dizzy Collection, Erben Der Erde: Die Grosse Suche 😉 etc...
I should hate my cd32 because i was selling them when Commodore went under! ! got left with over 230 games that i put into storage. Now seeing the prices people are asking for them helps take the pain away!
The CD32 fell through the cracks for me, and I never did pursue one. I'm not really a console guy outside of Xboxes. Nice job fixing this one. And it came out looking great! :)
The CD control trimmers for laser tracking error gain etc, need to be adjusted to read copied CDs, also the laser power adjustment may need adjusting. When properly setup it will read almost any copied CD. 4 trimmers and 1 on the laser module.
I dont know about this cleaning method, you should just use the brush and some warm water and soap in your sink, it might be the video but it looked like the dremel took a lot of plastic off and ruined the finish.
Great review! Note: Akiko ic is used for the CD drive. Not a single commercial released game use it for c2p or any other graphic related operation. Even its possible to use it for c2p coversion.
@@iXien it doesn't use Akiko for graphics and runs fine on my a4000 using cd32 emul that comes with ide-fix. its a forum myth that Microcosm uses Akiko,
I've still got my original CD32 with sx1. From memory it's got a 250mb hard drive and 6mb ram! Lives in the loft sadly with a bunch of original games but I've nowhere to set it up. Also the keyboard went missing long ago!
I still have the one I bought new during the fire sales before the collapse of Commodore. I think the only reason I still have it is that no one wanted to buy them post demise of Commodore. It was a thoroughly underwhelming product due to the poor software support at the time. I still have Sensible Soccer for it though I’ve not switched it on for years. I’ll get around to restoring it at some port but I still have a couple of A1200s and an A600 to do before it… they are more useful to me. A thoroughly enjoyable video 👍
Great vid! Nicely saved CD32! Could be worth looking into the laser power to get your CD-R’s to read… think there was a vid a few weeks ago by 10-min Amiga retro cast about that.
Thank you, you made me realise I can use the CD32 PSU in my 1581 project (saves me building one, lol). BTW some of the pinouts on the web show 12V connected to the ground pin - you are right not to trust them - always go to the schematics.
I was very tempted to get one back in the day but the software lineup was unimpressive and a stack of more powerful 32bit machines were just around the corner.
What is even the point? Is it backwards compatible to Amiga? And around the corner means like contemporary? 3do , Jaguar, 32x ? All three with CD, chunky hicolor and RISC CPU, two of them with two RISC CPUs.
The Eureka Communicator (I & II) could connect to the AUX port. You know most of them have the large caps (near the power switch) fitted 'Reversed Polarity' because the silk screen is wrong --- looks like they change component size/type at the last min... 13 duff discs ? Wow ! You were unlucky or maybe your LASER is under powered ?
I use an Apple USB 'superdrive' and burn at max speed on some basic unbranded / blank CDs so trying a sort of modern high quality drive might be worth it. (instead of some ancient drives at slow speeds) Not everything works, Some old gold audio CDR I have from the 2000s did not. Silver CDRs with the Apple drive work fine.
Try to get good brand "audio" grade writable CDs. They are a bit more costly (they have some kind of a copyright fee on them, which I don't understand) but their dye is more compatible with old CD-ROM drives like the one you got in there.
I didn't hate my CD32 but I never really liked it. I hated Commodore for being so inept. I got it late, right before Commodore folded when I was 13 or so to get me off my A500 and off my Dad's A1200. (My Dad helped at a local computer shop and I worked part time doing odd jobs. I got the CD32 and an SX-1 expansion cheap turning it into a very unstable A1200.) Commodore had no idea what they were doing. Nothing that madenit stand our from an A1200, nothing really new about the hardware, a controller that was trash and as far as I could tell completely under utilized... I don't know how it was approved for production other than sad desperation to do something, anything. It was something they should have done, maybe, in 1991 while continuing to work on a real next gen graphics and sound architecture for a new Amiga. It needed new and exclusive high quality games from big publishers. It was like the CDi and 3D0... just a hopeless waste. (Though I think my best friend and I actually spent more time on his 3D0 playing return fire than I ever did actually using CD games of any kind on my CD32 despite having access to essentially everything.) I sold it all after about a year and bought a used A4000 from my boss when she moved to a Win95 PC for her graphic work.
The CD32 was Commodore's last ditch hope to make a product to shift as they were going under. The CD32 is not really any different to Atari with the Jaguar; they were both in a similar financial situation by that point. I also had an SX-1 but had no stability issues with it. The issue I think Commodore had is they rested to the belief that thier product was king and were too slow to adapt to everything changing around them. If you look at Apple around time; they were not too great financial situation either and they got bailed out by Microsoft. I would suggest watching 'Pirates of Silicon Valley'.
@mikegravgaard340 the Jaguar was at least a genuinely new system, from the ground up; the CD32 was simply a consolised cash-in on the existing A1200. Interestingly, if you read Brian Bagnall's "Commodore: the Final Days" book he seems to think it was a smart product, although even he recognises there was more excitement around the equally unsuccessful 3DO back in 1993.
50:12 That's an expansion port to add back the computer functionality you're complaining is missing! Get a TF330 or SX32 board and it's a real Amiga home computer with a CD drive!
I got my CD32 for £5 sometime in the 2000's. It came with PSU, contoller and 5 games.
Happy New Year.
Wow!!!
I love my cd32! If you get a TF330 for it you have a 030 and more RAM you ever need. It boots from CF card and you can store several gigs of games and demos. You can use keyboard, mouse and controllers/joysticks.
Ich hatte 2 mal ein CD32 und hatte viel Spass damit z.b bei Superfrog. Uebrigens das Emerald Mine hatte ich damals auch. Was ich immer sehr mystisch fand war das Labyrinth of Time, was ich aber nie beenden konnte. Müsste es noch als 1 zu1 Kopie irgendwo haben. Klasse weiter so! happy new year!
Best games for the CD32 ?
Obviously the multi-disk ones like Simon the Sorcerer, Beneath a Steel Sky, Dark Seed,
Big 6 Dizzy Collection, Erben Der Erde: Die Grosse Suche 😉 etc...
I should hate my cd32 because i was selling them when Commodore went under! ! got left with over 230 games that i put into storage. Now seeing the prices people are asking for them helps take the pain away!
The CD32 fell through the cracks for me, and I never did pursue one. I'm not really a console guy outside of Xboxes. Nice job fixing this one. And it came out looking great! :)
Thanks! Same here.
The CD control trimmers for laser tracking error gain etc, need to be adjusted to read copied CDs, also the laser power adjustment may need adjusting. When properly setup it will read almost any copied CD. 4 trimmers and 1 on the laser module.
I dont know about this cleaning method, you should just use the brush and some warm water and soap in your sink, it might be the video but it looked like the dremel took a lot of plastic off and ruined the finish.
You can use the Amiga Test Kit on a normal Amiga to test the CD32 controller.
Thanks! Good tip!
Great review! Note: Akiko ic is used for the CD drive. Not a single commercial released game use it for c2p or any other graphic related operation. Even its possible to use it for c2p coversion.
Microcosm takes part of the Akiko libraries. That's why the game doesn't work on A1200 or A4000 😉
@@iXien it doesn't use Akiko for graphics and runs fine on my a4000 using cd32 emul that comes with ide-fix. its a forum myth that Microcosm uses Akiko,
I've still got my original CD32 with sx1. From memory it's got a 250mb hard drive and 6mb ram! Lives in the loft sadly with a bunch of original games but I've nowhere to set it up. Also the keyboard went missing long ago!
I just won an auction for an Sx1 on ebay. Looking very forward to making a video about it.
I still have the one I bought new during the fire sales before the collapse of Commodore. I think the only reason I still have it is that no one wanted to buy them post demise of Commodore.
It was a thoroughly underwhelming product due to the poor software support at the time. I still have Sensible Soccer for it though I’ve not switched it on for years. I’ll get around to restoring it at some port but I still have a couple of A1200s and an A600 to do before it… they are more useful to me.
A thoroughly enjoyable video 👍
Thanks! I feel the same!
Great vid! Nicely saved CD32! Could be worth looking into the laser power to get your CD-R’s to read… think there was a vid a few weeks ago by 10-min Amiga retro cast about that.
Thanks! I will check it out!
Thank you, you made me realise I can use the CD32 PSU in my 1581 project (saves me building one, lol). BTW some of the pinouts on the web show 12V connected to the ground pin - you are right not to trust them - always go to the schematics.
Yep. I learned that when I blew up my A3000.
I was very tempted to get one back in the day but the software lineup was unimpressive and a stack of more powerful 32bit machines were just around the corner.
I did not even know it existed until I got back into Retro Computers a few years ago. I had a Sega MegaDrive and then an XBox as a console.
What is even the point? Is it backwards compatible to Amiga? And around the corner means like contemporary? 3do , Jaguar, 32x ? All three with CD, chunky hicolor and RISC CPU, two of them with two RISC CPUs.
Get a Terrible TF330 030/50 expansion, it has IDE and a riser that you can plug a PS/2 keyboard into and it will give you a great system :)
The Eureka Communicator (I & II) could connect to the AUX port.
You know most of them have the large caps (near the power switch) fitted 'Reversed Polarity'
because the silk screen is wrong --- looks like they change component size/type at the last min...
13 duff discs ? Wow ! You were unlucky or maybe your LASER is under powered ?
Laser needed some tweeking.
Works now.
I use an Apple USB 'superdrive' and burn at max speed on some basic unbranded / blank CDs so trying a sort of modern high quality drive might be worth it. (instead of some ancient drives at slow speeds)
Not everything works, Some old gold audio CDR I have from the 2000s did not. Silver CDRs with the Apple drive work fine.
Try to get good brand "audio" grade writable CDs. They are a bit more costly (they have some kind of a copyright fee on them, which I don't understand) but their dye is more compatible with old CD-ROM drives like the one you got in there.
I've had many Amiga's but never a CD32. One day :)
It's that shiny thing that you think you need (to complete a collection) but then find out it's a disappointment ... and an expensive one right now.
@@RetroWK yeah totally… I’ll carry on looking for a nice 1084S 😂
I didn't hate my CD32 but I never really liked it. I hated Commodore for being so inept. I got it late, right before Commodore folded when I was 13 or so to get me off my A500 and off my Dad's A1200. (My Dad helped at a local computer shop and I worked part time doing odd jobs. I got the CD32 and an SX-1 expansion cheap turning it into a very unstable A1200.) Commodore had no idea what they were doing. Nothing that madenit stand our from an A1200, nothing really new about the hardware, a controller that was trash and as far as I could tell completely under utilized... I don't know how it was approved for production other than sad desperation to do something, anything. It was something they should have done, maybe, in 1991 while continuing to work on a real next gen graphics and sound architecture for a new Amiga. It needed new and exclusive high quality games from big publishers. It was like the CDi and 3D0... just a hopeless waste. (Though I think my best friend and I actually spent more time on his 3D0 playing return fire than I ever did actually using CD games of any kind on my CD32 despite having access to essentially everything.) I sold it all after about a year and bought a used A4000 from my boss when she moved to a Win95 PC for her graphic work.
The CD32 was Commodore's last ditch hope to make a product to shift as they were going under. The CD32 is not really any different to Atari with the Jaguar; they were both in a similar financial situation by that point.
I also had an SX-1 but had no stability issues with it.
The issue I think Commodore had is they rested to the belief that thier product was king and were too slow to adapt to everything changing around them.
If you look at Apple around time; they were not too great financial situation either and they got bailed out by Microsoft. I would suggest watching 'Pirates of Silicon Valley'.
@mikegravgaard340 the Jaguar was at least a genuinely new system, from the ground up; the CD32 was simply a consolised cash-in on the existing A1200.
Interestingly, if you read Brian Bagnall's "Commodore: the Final Days" book he seems to think it was a smart product, although even he recognises there was more excitement around the equally unsuccessful 3DO back in 1993.
50:12 That's an expansion port to add back the computer functionality you're complaining is missing! Get a TF330 or SX32 board and it's a real Amiga home computer with a CD
drive!