CompuServe Messages

John – IF Commodore licensed out the Amiga chips and their CDTV specs (which is a big IF), to whom would they do so? Sony, Philips, Matsushita, Hitachi, Nihon, Thomson, Sangyo, and Toshiba all have millions invested in CD-I. I suppose they could find someone. That's IF CBM were to license, which I doubt. Sure, "anybody can make a CDTV disc as long as he has an Amiga". You can now buy a CD-I player along with some test authoring software. And Amigas have sometimes been used to create CD-I audio files. But you're right: so far most people develop titles on larger systems, such as a network of Suns. Why? Because… "Anybody" is a bit broad. "Anybody" can make their own CD-A disc, too. "Anybody" can make a CDROM disc for a PC/Mac. But "Anybody" doesn't. You'd usually want a 1.2 gigabyte drive to develop on, for example, and probably a nice data tape drive for transfers. (Or do you have visions of Joe Amiga-owner sending over 700 floppy disks from his latest and greatest AmigaVision novel, to somebody who'll create the 650 meg CDROM? 🙂 And someone has to create all this data. Plus to get the right effect, you'll need to exactly duplicate reading a CDROM player to see if your program works the way you expected. Also you'll need a custom file manager or program to block the data out to CDROM formats; decide where you want the data on the CDROM for best access speed; and then send it on acceptable media to a mastering facility. This all assumes CBM themselves don't go into the mastering biz… hmm… that'd be a nice lockup wouldn't it? Only place which would accept AmigaDOS files… they may have this in mind; who knows? Anyway, sure it can be done, with some nice facilities. A slick setup might be this: a production studio with a half-dozen networked Amigas, to create and test the data/programs. Now that's a thought. – kev