A500 Promo

[bbond007]

How could they promote the CDTV?

"please buy this, we don't know what we made it for, but please buy it off us? We've got a ******** of them, they're all over the place, We have to wade through pointless wastes of engineering budget every time we want to use the coffee machine. They're like tribbles or something. Send help."

Yeah, its kind of like the Apple Newton. An idea way before its time.

Philips CDI also failed...

I suppose apple should have just given up on handhelds after the Newton and concentrated efforts on just computers.

[bbond007]

I can't really say people would want to watch a film in OCS graphics, thats what, 32 colour video? And no record function. I don't really understand why people who didn't use computers would have wanted one, over say a vcr and a nintendo or something.



What, canada?

From CDXL Wikipedia : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDXL

In an era shortly after the introduction of CD-ROM drives and before low cost MPEG decoding hardware became available the CDXL format was created primarily for the Amiga CDTV to permit playback of video from CD-ROM. CDXL was tailored for the Amiga chipset and took advantage of DMA transfers and relied little on the CPU [2]. As a result CDXL could only support weak video compression and therefore relatively low video resolutions and moderate frame rates.
The CDXL format initially allowed playback of up to 24 frames per second with up to 4096 colors encoded in HAM-6. Audio support allowed for 8-bit mono or stereo sound.

Here is an example of 24FPS HAM 6 Video. This is a Minimig, but you get the idea.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNWLtSWXtD8

I'm sure it supported EHB (64 color mode) which on a 320x200 screen, might not look too bad...

[bbond007]

Check this one out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLPPIyQXA4E

Cammy,

CDTV was a totally cool concept. CDs were a major leap in storage technology!

The encyclopedia stuff on CD was a really cool idea before its time. When I was in school my family had about a 60% complete encyclopedia set. Past like "P" you were screwed - Except for we had "W" for some reason.

I'd of rather had a CDTV