CDTV - Was there any good software?

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

Xenon II is a terrible game (slowdown, slow at full speed, 16 colour graphics, dodgy MOD of Megablast most demo coders would delete and not release....).

Love or hate it Xenon II still brought the most to the CDTV table on terms of a multimedia game disc which is what the CDTV wanted to bring to the table.

Regarding the game, terrible is going a bit far, technically its poor as its mostly an ST port if im not mistaken, but its got its fans and at the time was a big deal to have a full CD soundtrack, i personally loved the MOD on the disk version, would load the game just to listen to it more than play the game, in hindsight some may look at it badly, but certainly back then it was raved about.

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

but certainly back then it was raved about.

Which doesn't mean it was good. It was indeed a terrible game as ImmortalA1000 says.
Even back then I never thought it was any good despite the music! I would also boot up a copy and just leave it at the title. Never play it.

To be fair most if not all of the Bitmap Bros. games had gameplay deficiencies now with hindsight, but Xenon II is the only one I always found to be absolute garbage.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by Akira

Which doesn't mean it was good. It was indeed a terrible game as ImmortalA1000 says.
Even back then I never thought it was any good despite the music! I would also boot up a copy and just leave it at the title. Never play it.

To be fair most if not all of the Bitmap Bros. games had gameplay deficiencies now with hindsight, but Xenon II is the only one I always found to be absolute garbage.

No i was referring to the MOD music being raved about.

[volvo_0ne]

As far as I was concerned the best bit of software for the cdtv was Parnet.

It allowed me to access cd's without having those pig ugly pcmcia interfaces stuck in my a1200

[jotd]

I wonder if other games can be made like this where music & sfx can be combined in games where they're not.

that's one of my projects with CD32load: bring back some "music or sfx" games the sfx with the music on CD. Some possible candidates (for the CD32) would be:

- Gods (restoring PC in-game soundtracks)
- Leander
- Wonderdog

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by jotd

that's one of my projects with CD32load: bring back some "music or sfx" games the sfx with the music on CD. Some possible candidates (for the CD32) would be:

- Gods (restoring PC in-game soundtracks)
- Leander
- Wonderdog

That would be amazing. There's so many games where this could be added!

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by jotd

that's one of my projects with CD32load: bring back some "music or sfx" games the sfx with the music on CD. Some possible candidates (for the CD32) would be:

- Gods (restoring PC in-game soundtracks)
- Leander
- Wonderdog

Dont forget Supercars II! Something the sequel lacked but the first version had!

[DamienD]

I still wish someone would port Supercars International [DOS] to the Amiga

[haynor666]

So, only Xenon II CD add something in value. Tht's too bad bacause it's not the best shmup on amiga. Sadly after reading this topic looks like all games are just put straight on CD :/ At least some years ago was possible to install on HD with minimum of tricks.

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

Love or hate it Xenon II still brought the most to the CDTV table on terms of a multimedia game disc which is what the CDTV wanted to bring to the table.

Regarding the game, terrible is going a bit far, technically its poor as its mostly an ST port if im not mistaken, but its got its fans and at the time was a big deal to have a full CD soundtrack, i personally loved the MOD on the disk version, would load the game just to listen to it more than play the game, in hindsight some may look at it badly, but certainly back then it was raved about.

Well if Atari also had a CD-ROM based option for the ST then with CD music the ST version of Xenon 2 would be pretty damned identical to CDTV release

The 1991 £499 quid CDTV would have allowed us to have Amiga games of 100s of megabytes hard drive install type with 6 channel sound (2 of them in CD quality hint hint) via cheap CD-ROM but hardly any big companies who made millions out of the Amiga did something let alone a 100mb game like It Came from the Desert with loads of speech/music on CDDA tracks and extra graphics and animations on an even larger 'town' to explore...a bit like Sam n Max/Day of the Tentacle etc on 386 "multimedia PC" type game engines. Shame, would have loved that. I wonder what Cinemaware HAM based static screen presentation screens would have been like with all that spare storage space for each game or streamed anim-brushes synced to CD audio tracks etc.

CDTV is a classic example of a great machine that nobody really bothered to try and produce a killer app for to make the most of what it offered for little more than the price of a Commodore 20mb HDD and 512k trapdoor expansion for an existing Amiga 500 owner.

Turrican III and Lotus II etc proved that it was still the Amiga you wanted on your desk at home not a PC or Mac in 1991/92 and it was still half the price just like with 1985 A1000 vs PC XT and Mac 512k, only a SNES or Megadrive could go head to head with a proper Amiga game development.

[AmigaHope]

Part of the problem was that even though CD gives you a huge amount of storage, you're still limited by what you can fit into RAM and what your GPU is capable of. All that data on the disc but nowhere to put it. That's why, when it was used, it was mostly used for streaming audio and at best avoiding having to juggle a dozen floppies in something like Monkey Island.

The use case for CD-ROM becomes more apparent once the amount of RAM significantly exceeds the size of a floppy, and when the CD-ROM is fast enough to pull in data at a reasonable pace. (If you've played Beneath a Steel Sky CD talkie version, you'll notice that the seek times absolutely destroy the pacing of dialogue if you don't install it to HD)

If you look at the SegaCD and TurboCD they both suffered from this and most software just used it for streaming audio or cutscenes, or bad FMV games.

[Pyromania]

It has to be mentioned that PsycoKiller is the very best CDTV game. You have to see it to believe.

[Fiery Phoenix]

Originally Posted by Pyromania

It has to be mentioned that PsycoKiller is the very best CDTV game. You have to see it to believe.

With a Town With No Name a close second!

Man, Psycho Killer - check the longplay out (trades description act there) lasts about 6 mins!

As all the comments stated, just loads of missed opportunities, all that extra capability and just get the same game in most circumstances. Like the A1200 "enhanced" versions

[alexh]

A Guitar Hero style game would have easily been "do-able" on CDTV. Similarly Just Dance / Dance-Dance revolution with a mat.

Easy to look back with hindsight but even then it is obvious that music related gameplay was key.

I think that is why lots of CDTVs became BarFly Karaoke machines.

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by AmigaHope

Part of the problem was that even though CD gives you a huge amount of storage, you're still limited by what you can fit into RAM and what your GPU is capable of. All that data on the disc but nowhere to put it. That's why, when it was used, it was mostly used for streaming audio and at best avoiding having to juggle a dozen floppies in something like Monkey Island.

The use case for CD-ROM becomes more apparent once the amount of RAM significantly exceeds the size of a floppy, and when the CD-ROM is fast enough to pull in data at a reasonable pace. (If you've played Beneath a Steel Sky CD talkie version, you'll notice that the seek times absolutely destroy the pacing of dialogue if you don't install it to HD)

If you look at the SegaCD and TurboCD they both suffered from this and most software just used it for streaming audio or cutscenes, or bad FMV games.

tl;dr version
It Came from the Desert is crippled by being crammed onto 3 floppy disks....CDTV solves that and gives you 2 16bit audio channels extra for free like 386 PC + MT32 + Soundblaster 'Rolls Royce' PC gaming setup *spit* no need for some shit FMV remakes....just more time at the microphone and desk with Amiga running Dpaint III

more more more version....
As Seven of Nine would say, irrelevant, RAM has nothing to do with CD games unless you think CD games automatically means FMV bollox when in 1991 it meant more locations/more outcomes/more variety of randomly loaded audio/video assets in the SAME 1mb PC VGA/Amiga ECS hard disk installs of games being a convenient and cheaper option than Amiga 2000HD and Amiga 500+30mb Zorro 1 HDD. The Amiga OCS/ECS machines NEVER had a cheap base model hard drive equipped machine, even the A600 used insanely slow/expensive laptop hard drives to fight cheap desktop hard drive prices inside 386/286 High Street PCs. Consoles have bugger all memory to run game engine code from so I suspect why It Came from the Desert is so iffy on NEC, that and the fact only a nobhead would try and do FMV on a single speed CD-ROM drive like those early CD consoles.

I am specifically thinking about the CD part of CDTV being a really cheap way of getting Amiga hard disk type install versions of regular PC 1mb hard disk install only games etc. and very cheaply too at 499 in 1991 (the first PC CD-ROM drives before IDE units were a thing were about 300 quid alone.

The CDTV had 1mb same as a home/family targeted PC of 1990/1991. It wasn't until 1992 that 2mb was a minimum standard for High Street PCs that families would be purchasing (families do NOT ring up dodgy shops putting tiny adverts in the back of Computer Shopper and order some cobbled together backstreet PC like DOS nerds for 1000s of pounds).

I am not talking about anything other than PC hard disk install/never run from supplied floppies VGA PC versions of games that were also on Amiga. They are still the same 1mb Amiga and PC game engines. My point was precisely for games like It Came from the Desert specifically developed for a 50mb storage space not 880k x3 limiting capacity. 1mb of RAM is fine, I DON'T want the spastic acting in craptastic super dithered bollox vision It Came from the Desert on the NEC CD console NO SIR and you miss my point entirely.

Software houses get pirate proof platform for Amiga game sales, we get a virtual 150kb/s up to 700mb space for game data to expand the size and complexity of a game's potentialy and a free upgrade to the PC Roland MT-32 for music Soundblaster for SFX type audio setups that we were [incorrectly] being told was superior to the abilities of Portia...yeah I'd like to hear Super Stardust tunes on that cheesy MT-32 rubbish.

1MB makes little difference to the Cinemaware etc tools on how many possible options you can load in, it is the lack of space for different graphics/anims for that event you to be loaded in from and also why Wings is too boring after half an hour as there are only 3 'mini games' when a CDTV release could have had 30 different mini-games tied into the game engine.

The FMV 'dream' was a sickness, and sadly Cinemaware contracted it and died from it.....and It Came from the Desert CD release is like that last crap your body does as death occurs.

We need a proper movie of the original game and we also need a true CDTV upgrade with CDDA speech track etc and better fucking coding for the slap dash 10-12fps 'action' sequences of the Amiga original game engine. Oh well we don't always get what we want but there was nothing wrong with the CDTV technically in 1991, there was no multi-media jerky PC until the High Street 486 PC era around the time of CD32 later.

A missed opportunity I guess, one of many for Commodore run by tweedle dumb and tweedle dee (Gould/Ali years).

IF Blitz BASIC supports full access and control of the CD-ROM drive inside the CDTV I would make my own Cinemaware type 50mb game with CDDA speech tracks just to prove the point, The CDTV had 2 problems,

1. Commodore denying it is an Amiga CD based computer.
2. Scum large software publishers who made insane amounts of money selling utter crap conversions ALL THE TIME to Amigans spent exactly 'fuck all' on doing a proper CDTV game and Cinemaware who could have made a difference were busy going tits up wasting the last of their resources on some tacky nasty FMV cringefest version of Desert for NEC console.

Oh well.

[Mr Creosote]

I like Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective. Though it's hardly a system showcase. By today's standards, grainy stamp-sized videos. And the game was better on PC. The Case of the Cautious Condor is also nice. But again, not the best version on CDTV. The sort of sequel, Murder Makes Strange Deadfellows, is worse.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

The CDTV had 2 problems,

1. Commodore denying it is an Amiga CD based computer.
2. Scum large software publishers who made insane amounts of money selling utter crap conversions ALL THE TIME to Amigans spent exactly 'fuck all' on doing a proper CDTV game

3 problems. The third problem was that apart from the CD drive it was effectively a 1MB A500 without the keyboard, mouse, and floppy drive. Not to say that great things couldn't be done with it, and you could easily add the things it lacked up to 1MB A500 status (but no more). The problem was that developers were expecting more. As a platform the A500 was old hat, and the CDTV offered nothing to get them excited again. They were sick of the slow 68000 running code from slow ChipRAM, having to carefully manage limited memory, OCS graphics limitations, limited writeable storage etc. To make matters worse the CDTV was aimed at a market they didn't understand or trust.

This was at the same time that the Multimedia PC specification was released, which guaranteed a 16MHz 386SX, 2MB RAM, 256 color 640x480 VGA, Sound Blaster card or equivalent, and a 30MB hard drive as well the CD drive. Of course in practice this wasn't as great as it looked on paper, but the difference is that it was a modern computer spec, not a boring old A500 dressed up as a piece of HiFi equipment.

As someone who developed a CDTV title myself 'back in the day', I can say that you are right in thinking that the CDTV had more potential than they thought, but only in the hands of developers who were willing to put the time and effort into making it do great things. But why would they, when there was much more money to be made from PCs with far less effort? 650MB of CDROM storage sounds great until you factor in how many man-hours are needed to fill it with high quality content.

But we are well over that now. The CDTV is highly sought after as a collector's item and there is no longer the pressure to get titles out before the market dies. Development today is a breeze with modern equipment, and we know a lot more about how to get the best out of this old hardware. We no longer have the incentive of becoming rich from commercial sales, but we do have a motivated community of enthusiasts who are keen to see the CDTV reach its full potential. And today anyone can be a CDTV developer if they want, no need to sign NDAs and submit your title to Commodore for approval!

[Spriteer]

Typical Commodore. Market would have probably been ready for a pure console based on A500, but without ports and expandability. Something to challenge Megadrive and others. No HD or expansions, just a cheap console like CBM UK wanted.