What Makes The Amiga CD32 The Best Amiga?

[S0ulA55a551n]

Originally Posted by Gilbert

I think only 50% of A1200 users got harddrives. Back in the day, I knew 2 A1200 owners in real life and neither had a HD at the time.It would be interesting to see stats from Commodore. Reminds me of XBox360 - no game could use the hardrive to the full extent because the people who bought the Core model with no HD wouldn't be able to play it


Something else that makes the CD32 an excellent machine is that games made for it would have had extra levels - like Banshee was going to have 2 extra levels. Zool does have an extra level and I think Jetstrike does too. These were just early games often quickly ported so imagine the future enhanced versions that would be available.


Back in the 90s if your friend had a Megadrive you could mock him for only having 16 bits of power. According to Commodore's analysis the Megadrive and Mega CD twin CPU set-up is rated at 0.3 MIPS and the CD32 is rated at a huge 3.5 MIPS of power. The Megadrive was a good machine for the time but the CD32 roundly beats it. 3 button joypad?? No thanks!

But as previously stated the mega drive had such better graphics capabilities ( colours aside).

[manossg]

I would choose a CD32 every time over the Mega Drive or the SNES or both combined.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Gilbert

The Megadrive was a good machine for the time but the CD32 roundly beats it. 3 button joypad?? No thanks!

Beats it...with what exactly? MD had Sega's nearly perfect arcade classics, cutting edge stuff from Sonic Team, Treasure and so on. Who cares about CDs and some good-on-paper specs when you haven't got games? As for joypads, the CD32 one looks pretty uncomfortable, so not sure if its wise to try this angle.

Besides MD was released in 1988, so 5 years before CD32. Probably not a fair comparison. But then, if you picked SNES, it'd look even sillier

[Retro-Nerd]

Mega Drive Controller 1993 (one of the best for 2D games)







CD32 Controller 1993 (surely Top Five of the worst console controllers ever).






No discussion, really!

[S0ulA55a551n]

Snes pisses all over a cd32. And I love amigas, but im not mad. Nintendo are the gos of game making an design.

[roondar]

I was never a Sega guy back in the day and still don't get how people can like Sonic so much, but there's no doubt in my mind at all that the CD32 will at best get close-ish to the Mega Drive in terms of real world performance. It certainly won't be beaten by the CD32.

As for the SNES? Forget it. The CD32 does have a much faster CPU, this is true. But the SNES graphics chips is simply better for action games than anything AGA offers.

And this is coming from someone who has (and still does) defend the A1200 (by extension the CD32) as underrated and having more potential than many seem to think.

[mcgeezer]

As a gaming console the CD32 can't compete with a Megadrive, it's that simple.
As an A1200 it sometimes can.

To quote a line in a popular U2 song... "It's no secret ambition bites the nails of success"... That was Commodore all over with the CD32.

I like all Amiga's and I love the A1200 but the CD32 as a stock machine from back in the day it simply does not have enough appeal to directly make games for now... now if they stuck tile based hardware in there... 4 layers, 32 sprites at 16 colours and dropped backward compatibility, they could have had a winner.

[TEG]

I confirm that CD32 Controller is UNUSABLE! Cause the dots you can see on @Retro-Nerd photo on the disc. After some minutes of playing your thumb is hurting!

They never test it. It's impossible otherwise.

[lmimmfn]

When the CD32 was released and i read the review in either Amiga Format or CU Amiga i honestly thought it was rubbish as a console, no wow factor games and just a cut down 1200 with a cdrom. Commodore did absolutely nothing to advance Amiga as a console and pretty much just redid a newer CDTV at a lower price point.
Worse than that they never released an official cd drive for the 1200, that should have been released well before the cd32 to increase the Amiga AGA cdrom base.

And that controller, ffs, not sure who designed that but looks like a cheap 4 quid lump of plastic thrown in for the sake of it.

Nowadays i quite like the cd32 for what it is as an Amiga but it was badly ill thought back in the day

[Retro1234]

the CD32 could of beat the MegaCD for fmv and this was what was in at the time but no fmv games appeared and some games like MegaRace would of helped.

but fmv games time at the top was short lived and then came 3D.

[TEG]

Do we have Dragon's lair on the CD32? This is THE game that would make sense to have on CD-ROM instead of the bunch of floppies for the A500.

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by Gilbert

I think only 50% of A1200 users got harddrives. Back in the day, I knew 2 A1200 owners in real life and neither had a HD at the time.It would be interesting to see stats from Commodore. Reminds me of XBox360 - no game could use the hardrive to the full extent because the people who bought the Core model with no HD wouldn't be able to play it

The XBox comparison is just silly. XBox and Playstation games are always released on CD-ROM and Blu-Ray; so yeah you don't need hard drives.

...just because you only knew 2 people with A1200s and no hard drive doesn't make it fact; and I'm sure down the line they purchased / added hard drives.

Originally Posted by Gilbert

Something else that makes the CD32 an excellent machine is that games made for it would have had extra levels - like Banshee was going to have 2 extra levels. Zool does have an extra level and I think Jetstrike does too. These were just early games often quickly ported so imagine the future enhanced versions that would be available.

Errr, Banshee CD32 has one extra level.

Out of all the CD32 game there are probably only a handful that have extra stuff (beside audio tracks; big whoop) over the A500 / A1200 versions

[lilwshu]

Originally Posted by DamienD

The XBox comparison is just silly.

The sentiment is correct - I can think of hardly any A1200 hard drive only games released during its commercial lifetime (Sim City 2000 and Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo are the only ones that spring to mind), and for the bigger games you can certainly see compromises having to be made to make them run in any acceptable way from floppy disk in order to maximise the already questionable market for them.

Originally Posted by DamienD

...just because you only knew 2 people with A1200s and no hard drive doesn't make it fact; and I'm sure down the line they purchased / added hard drives.

You've responded to conjecture with more conjecture - if you have a look at sales on eBay, you'll see that quite a lot of A1200s never had hard drives fitted. In my experience from back in the day, most of them were bought as games machines and the majority of those buyers wouldn't know what a hard drive was.

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by lilwshu

The sentiment is correct - I can think of hardly any A1200 hard drive only games released during its commercial lifetime (Sim City 2000 and Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo are the only ones that spring to mind), and for the bigger games you can certainly see compromises having to be made to make them run in any acceptable way from floppy disk in order to maximise the already questionable market for them.

Are you kidding me; look at all these AGA games that are hard drive installable.

...and I'm not talking about WHDLoad.

I'm also not showing "AmigaCD" games, which usually need to be installed on HDD.

Then there Workbench that needs to be installed onto hard drive (and has been around since 1.3); and not to mention all the applications / programs that need installing...

Originally Posted by lilwshu

You've responded to conjecture with more conjecture - if you have a look at sales on eBay, you'll see that quite a lot of A1200s never had hard drives fitted. In my experience from back in the day, most of them were bought as games machines and the majority of those buyers wouldn't know what a hard drive was.

Again, maybe back in the day for a year or so, but I'd imagine the majority people who have an A1200 now would have a hard drive.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by TEG

Do we have Dragon's lair on the CD32? This is THE game that would make sense to have on CD-ROM instead of the bunch of floppies for the A500.

If only it was actually a game

The ones making sense to put on CD would be adventure games, like Beneath The Steel Sky (the other, more advanced games from PC probably would be too demanding for the hardware). But then you'd have to add mouse, aka turn it into A1200, and console audience is not into this type of games, so we're back to square one.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by S0ulA55a551n

Snes pisses all over a cd32. And I love amigas, but im not mad. Nintendo are the gos of game making an design.

Is this an obligation to use such a troll language ? I love both SNES and CD32, especially considering you can play with very little embarrasment the whole Amiga library on the CD32.

[lilwshu]

Originally Posted by DamienD

Are you kidding me; look at all these AGA games that are hard drive installable.

...and I'm not talking about WHDLoad.

I'm also not showing "AmigaCD" games, which usually need to be installed on HDD.

I said "A1200 hard drive only" in reference to whether A1200 games were specifically written to take full advantage of being installed onto hard drive, as CD32 games mostly weren't for their mass storage. This obviously changed when the Amiga stopped being commercially viable and the only ones left in use would have been expanded.

Originally Posted by DamienD

Then there Workbench that needs to be installed onto hard drive (and has been around since 1.3); and not to mention all the applications / programs that need installing...

Workbench of versions up to when A1200s disappeared from shop shelves never "needed" to be installed to hard drive.

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by lilwshu

Workbench of versions up to when A1200s disappeared from shop shelves never "needed" to be installed to hard drive.

Yeah good luck doing anything in Workbench 3.1 when running from floppy disk; even if you had 2 drives attached.

[lilwshu]

Originally Posted by DamienD

Yeah good luck doing anything in Workbench 3.1 when running from floppy disk; even if you had 2 drives attached.

I ran it like this for over a year doing stuff like Dpaint and word processing (admittedly I had two floppy drives and then got a hard drive).

[Retro-Nerd]

An A1200 without hdd was indeed a bit silly. I knew maybe 3-4 people (including me), but we all got a hdd after a few weeks. Then it was fun, a lot of games around 1993 had hd-installs.