The Commodore Amiga CDTV is, in a way, the ancestor of the Amiga CD32 game console.
Basically, it is an Amiga 500 with a CDROM drive. It was sold without keyboard or mouse, but it was possible to connect them to the CDTV.
A 3.5" floppy disk drive (800 KB), was developed for this computer.
It was designed to be a home entertainment device, but it was too expensive and only very little software was developed for this machine (Psygnosis made almost all the software for the CDTV).
In fact, a few years later Philips succeeded with its CD-I where Commodore failed.
There were two CDTV models : the CDTV-1 used the Amiga 500 hardware and the CDTV-2 used the Amiga 500+ hardware.
There even has been a prototype developed in 1992 called "CDTV-CR" (for Cost Reduced). Unlike other Amiga CR revisions, the CDTV CR was completely redesigned, utilizing the updated Amiga 600 technology (for more information, visit the Amiga Interactive Guide).
The manager of the team promoting the CDTV was Nolan Bushnell, the man who founded Atari. By strange twist of fate, the man in charge of Atari at the time, was Jack Tramiel, the man who founded Commodore.
Please consider donating your old computer / videogame system to Old-Computers.com or one of our partners from anywhere in the world (Europe, America, Asia, etc.).
I actually did dare to look it up, and discovered that the first public demonstration of the CDTV was on 2 June 1990, at CES. At the time, it had been under development for around 18 months, or since late 1988.
In fact, development was still going on even after that demonstration. In a letter from Commodore posted to the CompuServe Amiga forum in August 1990, the CDTV was described as still being "currently in development." The letter went on to clarify that, in spite of speculation regarding the as-yet-unreleased platform, Commodore was as committed as ever to entertainment software as well as education.
wait you know i am amigaman ,and are jealous wish it where someone else.So you lie about everything. TS!!! . you guys bs dont know the real date you gust screw up here now you say 1990 for the cdtv ..wait wiki and the others say 1991 ..dav even says 1990 .wrong idiots is 1986 really aga was out in 1990 Mass Brothers sold cdtv in 1988.Look it up if you dare -all version where out by commodore in 1987., Oh I have a screen grab of all you morons making fooltards of yourselves. w
Monday 25th July 2016
amigaman
My first Amiga, and probably the most beautiful.
The CD firmware was on 2 separate chips, and you needed to remove them if you wanted to use the 2.x ROM (so no more beautiful CD interface with those ROMs, but you could put them back in place when going back to 1.3), and doing so try not to break a "leg" of a chip...
Wednesday 27th June 2012
Frederic (France)
NAME
CDTV
MANUFACTURER
Commodore
TYPE
Home Computer
ORIGIN
U.S.A.
YEAR
1990
END OF PRODUCTION
1995
KEYBOARD
optional full-stroke professional keyboard
CPU
Motorola MC 68000
SPEED
7.14 MHz
CO-PROCESSOR
Denise (8373 SuperDenise), Paula, Agnus, Gary
RAM
512 KB (later expanded to 1Mb Chip RAM)
ROM
192 KB
TEXT MODES
60 x 32 / 80 x 32
GRAPHIC MODES
several graphic modes, most used : 320 x 240 (32 colors) / 640 x 240 (16 colors)
COLORS
4096
SOUND
four 8 bit PCM voices
SIZE / WEIGHT
430mm W x 330mm D x 95mm H
I/O PORTS
One credit card type slot (to save games scores) , 1 video slot, 1 DMA extension, Mouse & infrared joystick, Parallel, Serial, 15Khz RGB video, External floppy, Stereo RCA Audio jacks (16 bit), Colour composite Video output, MIDI In/Out, Headphone Jack
BUILT IN MEDIA
Internal single speed CDROM (with caddy)
OS
AMIGA DOS, Kickstart: 1.3 (+ additional CD support)
