I think the CD32 is a beautiful machine. It is the smallest classic Amiga motherboard, and the most advanced. It has Akiko and 1MB of ROM! Of course if Commodore had the forethought they obviously lacked, they would have included a 030 and FastRAM as standard, just as the A4000 had (and the A1200 should have), but that's in the past and we can only work with what we were given.
With a plain CD32 you can play not only CD32 games but hundreds of Amiga games through WHDLoad. The CD drive is 2x speed, so it's slow. Games take a little while to load, especially from burned CDs. The controller is alright while the D-pad is still working (especially if you have the additional + pad for it), but it's best replaced with something better eventually. The Competition Pro/Honeybee CD32 controller is great, but it's been the rarest and most sought-after Amiga peripheral for many years now, so you'd have to be very lucky to find one that doesn't get snapped up by wealthy collectors. You would be really better off asking AmigaManiac how much longer their Playstation2-CD32 adapters are going to take before they come out. These ones are based on Paul Willingham's design so they're the most advanced program around, allowing you to use the analogue sticks as joysticks or mice, programming extra buttons, and it lets you use a guitar controller in Tracker Hero.
All PAL CD32s need at least one large capacitor changed around, it was put in backwards in the factory. Most NTSC CD32s don't suffer the same problem. Unfortunately many people have problems running PAL games on NTSC CD32s. The only real solution to this anyone has come up with is to install an Indivision and output your CD32 through a VGA monitor. Unfortunately no one in the world seems to have installed the Indivision in an NTSC CD32 and reported back if PAL games work or not.
