Amiga CD32

• 1. Introduction

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  The Amiga CD32 was announced to the world on the 16th of July 1993, not at a trade show or gaming convention, but at the Science Museum in London. The British media greeted it with great fanfare. Commodore called it the world's first 32-bit CD games console. It was a bold claim, and one that would soon face scrutiny.

  Behind the spectacle, Commodore's finances were in serious trouble. The CD32 was not just a new product; it was the company's best hope for survival. Could a single games console save a struggling computer maker? And what would happen when the American launch ran headlong into a federal court order?

  This is the story of a console that sold out in Britain, sat stranded in the Philippines, ended up inside arcade cabinets in Italy and slot machines in casinos, and was discontinued just eight months after it launched.

• 2. A Console Born From Crisis

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  Despite the Amiga's healthy popularity across Europe as of 1992, Commodore's financial situation had become dire. The CD32 was codenamed "Spellbound," and it carried that weight literally: the company needed this machine to reverse its fortunes.

  Unlike the CDTV, which Commodore had released two years earlier as a multimedia device, the CD32 was designed explicitly as a games machine. At its core it was essentially an Amiga 1200 personal computer stripped of its keyboard and I/O ports, with a CD-ROM drive added in place of the floppy. The processor was a Motorola 68EC020 running at 14.32 MHz in NTSC configurations, paired with 2 MB of chip RAM shared between the CPU and the chipset. That shared memory arrangement meant the processor was bottlenecked when accessing RAM, a limitation it inherited directly from the Amiga 1200 running without dedicated fast RAM.

  Commodore also added the Akiko chip, a component that handled CD-ROM control and a function called chunky-to-planar graphics conversion, which was intended to make porting games easier. The system shipped with AmigaOS 3.1 and a 1 MB Kickstart ROM containing the CD32 firmware. It could display a 24-bit color palette of 16.8 million colors, and in a special HAM-8 video mode it could show 262,144 colors on screen simultaneously.

• 3. The 32-Bit Claim

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  On the box, Commodore printed the phrase "The World's First 32-Bit CD Games Console." In Europe and North America that claim held up, but on a global scale it was beaten to market by seven months by the FM Towns Marty, a console released exclusively in Japan.

  Commodore could counter that the comparison was not straightforward. The CD32's 68EC020 processor had a 32-bit data bus both internally and externally. The FM Towns Marty used an Intel 386SX, which carried only a 16-bit external data bus despite being internally 32-bit. The distinction mattered to hardware enthusiasts, though it did little to settle the marketing debate.

  At Christmas following the September 1993 launch, the CD32 accounted for 38 percent of all CD-ROM drive sales in Britain, outselling the Mega-CD. Across its brief market life, roughly 100,000 units were sold in Europe, with approximately 25,000 of those going to German buyers.

• 4. The American Wall

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  Commodore demonstrated the CD32 at the World of Commodore Amiga show in Pasadena in September 1993. The plan was to sell the console in select American cities by Christmas, with wider distribution following in January 1994. Computer Gaming World reported in November 1993 that a significant amount of software would be available immediately for the American launch, based on the Amiga 1200 software library. The US retail price was set at $399, bundled with two pack-in games: Pinball Fantasies and Sleepwalker, plus six separately sold launch titles.

  Then a deadline arrived that Commodore could not meet. The company owed 10 million US dollars in patent royalties to a firm called Cad Track, which held an XOR patent that Commodore had used without settling its obligations. A federal judge issued an injunction blocking Commodore from importing anything into the United States.

  Commodore had already built up a CD32 inventory at its manufacturing facility in the Philippines, ready for the American rollout. With the injunction in place, those units could not be shipped. They sat in the Philippines until the debts owed to the facility's owners were eventually settled. Commodore declared bankruptcy not long after, and the CD32 was never officially sold in the United States. Imported models crossed the border from Canada, and mail-order stores brought in units for domestic customers, but the formal launch never came.

• 5. Software and Its Limits

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  Most games released for the CD32 were ports of titles already available for the Amiga 1200 or Amiga 500. Few took advantage of what a CD-ROM drive actually offered: CD-quality audio tracks or full-motion video were largely absent from the library.

  The launch bundle in Europe paired Diggers, a new game from Millennium Interactive, with Oscar from Flair Software. A later pack substituted in Dangerous Streets, a one-on-one fighting game that the gaming press had already savaged. Amiga Power had rated Dangerous Streets just 3 percent. Reviewers were baffled that Commodore chose this title to represent its machine against powerful rival consoles entering the market.

  Several magazines launched to cover the platform. Paragon Publishing produced Amiga CD32 Gamer, which ran for 21 issues before its final edition in February 1996. Computer Gaming World, writing in January 1994, acknowledged that the Amiga was a great gaming platform despite Commodore's earlier efforts to downplay that fact, but questioned whether enough US developers would invest in the system to make an American launch worthwhile. The CDTV's commercial failure was still fresh in the industry's memory.

• 6. Life Beyond the Living Room

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  In 1993, the London Transport Museum at Covent Garden installed 109 CD32 units to run its interactive exhibits. Visitors could access information, animations, pictures, and text in multiple languages, and a London Underground simulator. The systems were built by a Hampshire company called Index Information, based in Odiham, using their CD32x interface units.

  In 1995, an Italian company named CD Express adapted the CD32 into an arcade cabinet called the CUBO CD32. Standard consumer CD32 hardware was connected to an external circuit board that routed input and output through a JAMMA connector, the industry-standard wiring harness used in arcade cabinets. Nine original games are known to have been produced for this platform, all created by CD Express.

  Slot machine manufacturer StarGames used stripped-down CD32 motherboards in machines including Hawaiian Delight, Leprechaun Luck, and Mister Magic during the late 1990s and early 2000s. The language-learning company Wall Street Institute ran CD32 systems at its learning centers from 1994 to 1997, attaching floppy drives and clock units to save student progress and sync it with teachers. In Burnaby, British Columbia, Taurus Ventures Inc built the VanCity Direct TV system for the VanCity Credit Union in 1995, using a custom modem also designed in-house. And in the mid to late 1990s, some vehicle registries in Canada used CD32 systems for interactive multimedia testing for driver's license applications.

• 7. Expansion and Aftermath

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  Third-party manufacturers moved quickly to address what the CD32 lacked. Expansion packs including the Paravision SX-1, the DCE SX-32, and Terrible Fire's TF328, TF330, and TF360 added components like 2.5-inch IDE drives, keyboard connectors, and blocks of fast memory ranging from 8 MB to 64 MB. The SX-32 included a 68030 processor running at 25 MHz, a significant step up from the base hardware.

  The SX-1 had a fitting problem: it was apparently designed around Commodore's mechanical specifications rather than the actual production units, so it did not fit well and required an internal modification. If the console was handled roughly, the expansion could come loose. Commodore itself deliberately avoided offering official expansion hardware of this kind, not wanting to repeat what it had done with the CDTV, which it had made convertible into an enhanced Amiga 500.

  Commodore did design one relevant hardware addition before its collapse: an external CD-ROM drive for the Amiga 1200 that incorporated the CD32's Akiko chip, effectively making any A1200 compatible with CD32 software. Only one prototype of this device, called the CD1200, is known to survive. It is held at the Retro Computer Museum in Leicester.

  Commodore's MPEG decompression module, demonstrated at the 1994 CeBIT show and priced at around 200 British pounds, added support for Video CD and CD+G playback through an MPEG decoder chipset from C-Cube and 1.5 MB of video RAM. Commodore International never officially released it, but Commodore UK produced units for the American market during the bankruptcy proceedings, along with other hardware components and software.