CDTV ?'s
2 messages in this thread
I've just ordered the CDTV for $299 (and will order the upgrade kit with
diskdrive and keyboard…) and have a couple of questions…
1. Will the CDTV run Amigavision software?
2. Can I add a hard disk to the system? (I notice in the system specs theres
no mention of a SCSI port, but someone else said it could be done?)
3. Am I making a wise move by getting the CDTV? I just read an article about
AGA and Workbench 3.0 and it sounds like the CDTV may become an orphaned
product…
I'm a multimedia producer and have worked exclusively on PCs and Macs and the
idea of picking up an Amiga for $400 sounded too good to be true…
Paul Unterweiser, Unterweiser Studio-Animation
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.