CompuServe Messages

Paul: Me again. Re system requirements for Amigavsion: Commodore says that AV up to 1.7 will run on an Amiga with one floppy and one meg of RAM, which would include CDTV with a floppy drive. Commodore recommends, however, that to effectively author applications (not just run them under Amigavision or toy around) you should have three megs of RAM and a hard drive. Amigavision Professional, which is more elaborate and more expensive, requires a minimum of 2 megs RAM and a hard drive, though 4 megs is suggested. As I mentioned in my other posts, you can add RAM and a SCSI hard drive to the CDTV, as well as a second floppy (if you get one with a pass-through port and use it as the first drive). So it's possible to use CDTV as its own development platform, but not as efficiently as you could use, say, an A1200 or A4000 to accomplish the same work. I would treat the CDTV as a low-end Amiga system with an integrated CD-ROM drive. It is running an older version of AmigaDOS and Workbench that is quite capable but not up to current standards (you can run Workbench 2.x on non-AGA Amigas and gain considerably, but unfortunately the CDTV's ROM BIOS hasn't yet been upgraded to make it compatible). I would play with it and see if it seems to offer potential, bearing in mind that it is at the low end of Amiga computing power. If you get into CDTV or the Amiga and think it has professional applications, then you might consider going to a standard Amiga computing platform rather than upgrading the CDTV itself. By the way, as a Mac and PC user, you may be interested to know that you can emulate both on the Amiga, and therefore on CDTV as well, either in software or hardware. This works best, of course, with higher-end Amigas.