What Makes The Amiga CD32 The Best Amiga?

[Konrad]

Originally Posted by Gilbert

There was a rumour

Rumours ?!? Never heard of those. Without confirmation not valid anyway.
And still, a competitive product would have succeeded. But the CD32 wasn't.

Originally Posted by Gilbert

As for comparing CD32 with consoles - it never got started so not fair,

We all know the technical abilities of all three consoles. Not even on paper the CD32 stood a chance.

Originally Posted by Gilbert

Also Starfox/Doom etc used Super FX or Super FX 2 chips. The SNES was basically a video passthrough. You could expand the Amga so it runs a better version of Doom.

I could accept your argument for f.ex. SegaMegaCD Games where you first had to buy a MegaCD. But this isn't the case here:You didn't have to upgrade the SNES. You had a bog-standard SNES, bought Starfox and could play the game. So yes, these games count. (And no, the SNES wasn't just a passthrough.)

Originally Posted by Gilbert

You missed that Guardian on CD32 is much better than the A1200 version. Also Banshee on CD32 maybe be better. The CD32 had the best version of all those games

I disagree with Guarding being much better on the CD32. Controls, yes.
Never really liked and played banshee, what is "maybe" better there ?

Originally Posted by Gilbert

You reminded me of something that makes the CD32 way better than any other Amiga - it can have 4 channels of sound effects and play music. So many Amiga games suffer from reduced music quality or worse - only music or SFX.

Music is in fact what in my opinion was mostly better on Amiga in comparison to consoles.
And that many games suffer from just Music of Sound is lazyness IMO.
Play titles like Turrican 1-3 f.ex. where you can enjoy very good music and sound together.
Yes, CD32 could play cdaudio. Which is cool, don't get me wrong. But not much of a needed or extravagant feature.

Originally Posted by Gilbert

HD's don't count - because you could buy a CD drive for A1200 if you wanted and almost make it a CD32. That's extra hardware

HD's do count as most Amiga 1200's came standard with harddrive. And the mentioned titles were also disk releases. So you could buy the disk-versions, startup your standard A1200HD and install the games.

Originally Posted by Gilbert

A4000 is good but like you say expensive - buy a Sharp X68000 instead and play arcade perfect games (Final Fight etc) and do creative work.

Your initial statement was simply "What makes the Amiga CD32 the best Amiga ?". You weren't talking money. And besides the X68000 not being available in Europe it also is no Amiga , so doesn't make sense to mention here.
Thus I stand to my opinion: The best Amiga in my opinion is still A4000. If we're talking money the A1200(HD).

Originally Posted by Gilbert

The only problem with the CD32 was that it was a consolized computer (A1200) rather than an actual games console.

Indeed. A "crippled" A1200. With an obsolete Akiko. And if the cd-drive gives up at some point most people can't repair or change it themselves, as opposed to A1200 and A4000 being able to buy generic cdroms or even cdburners.

Originally Posted by Gilbert

But I think a lot of people don't like it without taking into account the improvements it made to the other Amiga's

I don't see those great improvements.

Originally Posted by Gilbert

The CD32 is still the best Amiga though

No :P

[jotd]

And if the cd-drive gives up at some point most people can't repair or change it themselves

generally the lens/laser is at fault, and it can be replaced rather easily.

[Konrad]

Not for the average user/consumer. Those will have to give the device avay for repair.
I take everyhing apart and try to repair by myself (and I have a good hitrate ). But this is not the case for everyone.
Just wanted to say that desktop Amigas have even here a slight advantage.

[sokolovic]

?Generally, when someone begin to speak about the X68000 and blaming the Amiga to don't be technically on par with it without mentioning that it wasn't available in western countries and cost 3000$ in his home country at that time, you know that the topic will be a dead end.

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

?Generally, when someone begin to speak about the X68000 and blaming the Amiga to don't be technically on par with it without mentioning that it wasn't available in western countries and cost 3000$ in his home country at that time, you know that the topic will be a dead end.

Yup, is like having a Fiat 500 and complaining why it does not perform like a Ferrari...

[jotd]

@Konrad I absolutely suck at anything electronics. I just followed the excellent Akira lens replacement twice and fixed 2 failing consoles.

Real amiga repairs involve recapping and soldering. Not something I would attempt on my working board... I just repaired a A2000 keyboard (with a tutorial) and switched the A500 failing floppy by a A1200 one (using a lego to make the eject button longer, and taping the wires instead of soldering them...). Changing RAM or drives doesn't count as "repairing" IMHO.

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by jotd

@Konrad I absolutely suck at anything electronics. I just followed the excellent Akira lens replacement twice and fixed 2 failing consoles.

That makes you God of engineering in comparison with me.

[-Acid-]

Originally Posted by Konrad

HD's do count as most Amiga 1200's came standard with harddrive.

Err did they? i would say the majority of A1200s sold were without one, in the UK at least. My first one cost £60 (for a 60Mb drive) so about the cost of a console game to get one in there.

[Konrad]

All owners i knew had A1200's with HD. Directly from the shop, not added afterwards.
The first units were delivered without hd, although I don't know how many and when that changed.

[sneeker]

Yet here in the uk, near enough every a1200 of anyone I knew came without a hdd installed, and everyhbody was shoehorning 3.5" drives in them within 6 months as the drives where far cheaper.

[-Acid-]

I think Germany always had a history of having higher spec Amiga's than the UK market did. Didn't the German divison insist on A600's having hard drives in them from the start or something along those lines?

[Retro1234]

they tried to capitalise of the publics love of bit, it's 32Bit Wow but really it had no memory or anything else it fell short of other 32Bit machines even the Sega 32x at best it could of competed with the Snes and Mega Drive as a cheap console if it was cheaper and with some FMV games the CDi and MegaCd but FMV games never appeared and there was nothing exceptional.

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by Gilbert

Ruff n tumble is good but...

C'mon man the Amiga it was realised 6 years after Intellvision which had 8 sprites. 8 sprites is not enough! Not to mention it cost a fortune when it was first released.

The problem wasn't the amount of sprites, since you can easily multiplex and get tons of sprites.

The problem with the OCS sprites was that they are 16 pixels wide only, and that you only have 4 of them if you want them to be in 16 colors like the rest of the graphics.

What would be great is 16 colour sprites and 32 pixels wide.

And on your second point, just more sprites wouldn't have made the Amiga much easier to code for.

It's a difficult machine. Difficult to set up, difficult to work with or around the OS, Amiga sprites are weird, getting BOBs and blitting running is hard, it's difficult to do stuff that's easy on any other machine that I have worked with.

I can understand why man preferred the ST back in the day to code games for, especially british coders that were familiar with coding games for the Spectrum and CPC.

[PortuguesePilot]

I never owned a CD32. I say that upfront because it IS important. People become fanboys (let's not kid ourselves, that's all we are these days about these machines we love) when they owned or played with the machine back in the glory days...

Much of what I had to say has already been said. I agree with the guys that say that the CD32 is little more than a crippled A1200 (no keyboard, no mouse, needs the SX-1 to be what the A1200 was out of the box). A much talked about but actually meagre Akiko chiphe, the ability to read CDs (at a Whopping! 300k/s, haha) and decode CDDA tracks wasn't enough to make it better than the A1200. In my personal opinion - I, being a fan of retro COMPUTERS - the CD32 isn't even better than the A500 on the final average. That's why I own 3 A500 and 0 CD32 (that and nostalgia, as I said above).

I also remember the CD32 launch and, as another member has mentioned here, I remember feeling underwhelmed. The CD32 stood no chance whatsoever. The SEGA Saturn was much, much better (and still got massacred by the eventually ubiquitous PlayStation a few meters down the road...) The CD32 was still hung on the old paradigm of games and didn't offer - I argue that it couldn't offer - the true possibility of next-gen gaming. As I said myself on another thread ("is AGA real Amiga spirit", or something like that), the CD32 was Commodore's last ditch effort to still be in the market and make a few bucks. It was never a true contender at anything.

When I came to the Amiga World - in 1989, before owning one and 1990 with my own - The Amiga ruled supreme as the absolute best of two worlds - computing and gaming. It was on par with many overpriced, overpowered but underperfoming PCs of the time on what came to computing and was better than the consoles (with the best available being the NES and the MasterSystem) for gaming. The MegaDrive was the first console to really challenge the Amiga as the king of gaming and that only reached Europe in late 1990. And even with all the better features it had, the MegaDrive still lacked compared to the Amiga in some key areas (resolution, sound & music, inputting [no keyboard, no mice], etc). Only the SNES (for gaming) and a bit later the cheapening of the 486DX2+VESA SVGA+CD-ROM PCs (as a true multimedia machine) killed the Amiga.

Comparatively, the CD32 was a stillborn. During a few years of my life, I didn't even consider it an Amiga at all. It was just the CD32. Later, already on the 21st century, I did concede and went "ah, it does say Amiga in it, it is based off the A1200... OK, you can be an Amiga, then". But even in being so magnanimous, never - EVER - would I dare to say that CD32 is the best Amiga. It never was, it isn't and it will NEVER be.

[chip]

I emulate Amiga since 2002 with WinUAE

But two machines i just tried and immediately put apart were CD32 and CDTV

I really don't need both of those

So, no, CD32 is NOT the best Amiga IMHO

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by chip

I emulate Amiga since 2002 with WinUAE

But two machines i just tried and immediately put apart were CD32 and CDTV

I really don't need both of those

You can send me that CDTV along with a small donation, and I'll gladly rid you from your troubles with them.

[chip]

There's a misunderstanding

I tried the CD based machines with emulation

[dreadnought]

Saying CD32 is a best Amiga is a bit like saying Jaguar was the best Atari

(though the latter at least had a killer app: AvP)

[DanScott]

Originally Posted by jotd

Perfect example of laziness: Core titles: Premiere CD32 is exactly the same version as the floppy, with up for jump and even the infamous MUSIC OR SFX left in! SHAME... (until I redid it with sfx+music+button jump in 2019, like it should have been at its release)

Yeah, would have been nice to do proper CD32 versions, but we just couldn't afford to go back and spend another month or 2 on each game we wanted to re-release on CD.

As it was, I believe that all the CD32 versions were farmed off to Rob Northern, and were created (hacked) from the original master floppies..

I wasn't even aware of these CD32 versions until they were actually released.

[jotd]

that explains a lot. Rob Northen just applied his CD-routines & joypad reads. no other improvements.

On the Core Design side, I bridged the gap with Wonderdog & Premiere getting proper treatment sfx AND music and proper joypad controls (with blue button for jump)

Something could be done for Chuck Rock but there's only one music track so it would be rather repetitive. The music is good but annoying on all levels probably (I always chose sfx)