CD1200 Prototype where to buy?

[psxphill]

UPDATE: Now I just found this consists of the CDROM unit and also special accelerator card that contained SIMM slot, CPU and Akiko.

I'm pretty sure it wasn't going to include a CPU. The Akiko supposedly wasn't hardware compatible with the CD32 and an 030 with RAM could do the conversion quicker than Akiko anyway.

Using an IDE or PCMCIA drive was a much better option.

In hindsight I should have bought a CD32 & accelerator

[psxphill]

Fair enough. The Commodore 65 Prototype can't have been as rare as this then to sell on eBay

No, there are considerably more commodore 65 prototypes in circulation. In the 1990's you could buy them mail order from the US.

CD-1200 wasn't a great design and it happened at a time when commodore imploded, so it was only to make it look like commodore were worth buying. A PCMCIA card would have been a better option, you could have fitted the FMV and chunky to planar on it but still had the expansion card free.

The 74 minute CD length being to do with Beethoven's 9th symphony may not be accurate http://www.snopes.com/music/media/cdlength.asp.

[psxphill]

Maybe it was different in the UK,

It was very different in the UK, the PC didn't really take off as a home computer until Windows 95 launched. A lot of people were playing Doom and X-Wing at work during their lunch breaks though.

Around that time the PS1 took the non geek games market, previously the Amiga had catered for both.

[psxphill]

Just realised that Beth Richard should be able to shed some more light on the CD1200.  Her name is on the silkscreen and she was heavily involved in the CD32 and FMV projects at Commodore.

Did you not read the whole of the thread?

http://www.amiga.org/forums/showpost.php?p=816409&postcount=25

Also I think that there might have been problems with Akiko and the 16-bit PCMCIA interface.  Not that Akiko was particularly useful anyway.

It's not essential as the games went through the OS, which used the CPU if there was no akiko. All of the PCMCIA CD solutions that came out relied on that for compatibility. The CPU routines weren't the most optimal, so you really needed an accelerator. There were patches later on that improved them, but I don't think the 020EC in the A1200 could ever truly beat Akiko. Some hardware on the PCMCIA slot should have been able to do it quicker (it's a pity they didn't go ahead with the plan of chunky pixels for AGA).

I think at the point the CD1200 was done then commodore were really scraping hardware together from whatever they could find and they already had akiko from CD32 so they just used some glue logic.