CompuServe Thread

Modifying a CDTV to read other formats? You mean, will there be a way to read Mac CD-ROMs on a CDTV? You have an Amiga, don't you? 🙂 Reading the disc and finding its files is one thing, it's another matter entirely to run an application stored on a disc, and very often the disc *requires* a certain machine type to execute these "engine" programs that actually give you access to the data on the disc. I may be wrong here, but off-the-cuff, I think CDTV uses the ST-506 connection available on the A2091-ish chipset and software that Commodore uses in their hard disk controller products. In the July issue of AmigaWorld, Senior Technical Editor Lou Wallace has an article about the A570, Commodore's new add-on to the Amiga 500 that makes it (essentially) CDTV-compatible. In that article, he states that there's even room for a small SCSI hard disk inside the A570 case – "small" meaning the new two-and-1/2 laptop hard disks from the PC and Mac market. I've got the full CDTV developer's docs here, but the pile is so mountainous I haven't memorized it. The nice thing is, because Commodore defined the interface spec in software, not hardware, it's been possible for companies like Xetec to emulate CDTV by emulating the 'cdtv.device' in software.