#Renegade Software
Greg: Kodak has agreed to license official PhotoCD code to a number of
platforms but so far has resisted Commodore's interest in same. I actually
spoke with a Kodak employee who told me the company simply didn't care if
PhotoCD support ever came to the Amiga. If software support is faltering,
in this case it isn't because Amiga commercial software developers haven't
been trying legitimate avenues.
As someone else noted, Kodak has a deal with Philips, whose CD-I machine
that competes with Commodore's CD32. There is suspicion that this
prevented Commodore's acquisition of a PhotoCD license. Odd, since even
poor little Atari Computer apparently has been able to acquire one. This
suspicion is based on an incident several years ago when Commodore
introduced CDTV ahead of CD-I, making it the first TV-ROM machine on the
market.
As I recall published reports, Commodore demonstrated CDTV's ability to
show PhotoCD images at a computer show and said it was talking to Kodak
about a license. Philips apparently was put off by this, since CD-I's own
PhotoCD capability wasn't ready to be shown. The rest is history.
Understand that C= never marketed PhotoCD code in CDTV. It now says CD32
is PhotoCD-ready, meaning the hardware is up to the task. Nevertheless,
several years have passed and still no movement on a license from Kodak,
as far as anyone knows.
Meanwhile, when third party Amiga developers saw PhotoCD viewers appearing
on other platforms, they naturally jumped right in to offer an
alternative. In that respect, how is a PhotoCD viewer different from, say,
Microsoft Excel being able to import/export Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet files?
— Ron Legro from Milwaukee via AUTOPILOT
(The only way to fly)