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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: zektor on April 19, 2009, 08:29:06 PM
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I finally found and purchased a nice A570 cd-rom unit for my Amiga 500. What a great piece of hardware. I really like it!
I did have some questions tho, and maybe somebody else here owns one and the few software titles I am having issues with.
I have tested it with a dozen or so music cd's, and that works great. The seller also included some games and edutainment titles in CDTV cd-rom format. They are all originals as well. But, a few just will not work.
Defender of the Crown works, so does The Fred Fish Collection, American Hertiage Dictionary, Advanced Military Systems. But, "Grolier Encyclopedia" and "The New Basics Electronic Cookbook" refuse to work.
What happens is they initially start loading, I see the CDTV logo and then a black screen and they stop loading. I tried cleaning the discs, and even tried copying them to blank cd-rs and trying those. But, no matter what, just these two discs will not function.
Any idea why? I am running on a standard NTSC Amiga 500 w/512 expansion and 1.3 rom. Nothing special, and I would imagine that this would be all you would need. Are there CDTV compatibility issues with the A570? Information on th enet regarding the drive is very sparse.
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To be honest this is a complete guess, but have you tried disabling your 1/2 meg expansion to see what happens?
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Are the ones failing PAL?
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They might require 1 MB chip as CDTV was ECS only. Kick 1.3 should be fine.
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I initially had the expansion out, but with it removed all of the CD's had issues. Defender of the Crown would play the sound, but the graphics were all scrambled. I popped in the expansion and it was fine. So, I guess the expansion is necessary for the A570 to function correctly.
As for PAL, I was thinking that but I cannot tell. These discs do not specify NTSC or PAL. I'll have to try it on a PAL 500 and see how it goes.
Still, does anybody know of an available A570-CDTV compatibility list anywhere online?
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As mentioned, it's probably the lack of the 1MB Chip RAM. When I bought my A570 years ago it came with a voucher for a free motherboard upgrade/replacement.
Grolier Encyclopedia was the pack in CD so it definately works with the A570.
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Aha. Thanks for the heads up. Also, does this have a battery inside? Seems to retain my time and date. Reason I ask is because I wonder if it is advisable to remove it if it does have one!
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zektor wrote:
Aha. Thanks for the heads up. Also, does this have a battery inside? Seems to retain my time and date. Reason I ask is because I wonder if it is advisable to remove it if it does have one!
As far as i know the CDTV has no battery .
While plugged in it retains the time
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http://www.amiga-hardware.com/showhardware.cgi?HARDID=33. (http://www.amiga-hardware.com/showhardware.cgi?HARDID=33.)
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Edit: Never mind. There doesn't appear to be a battery on the circuit board. I was looking at the A690 prototype circuity board. The space the battery occupies seems to be missing from the A570 pictures. (Maybe it's a detached battery?) Best bet would be to open it up and take a look or wait for someone that has an A570 around to comment.
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http://www.amiga-hardware.com/showhardware.cgi?HARDID=533 (http://www.amiga-hardware.com/showhardware.cgi?HARDID=533)
Click above for lots of info about the A570 . You can see pics of the board with the battery etc...
Nice find ... Thats probably next on my list
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Fixed my problem! Yes, it was chip memory. Luckily I had a rev 6a board and I used the instructions over at Aminet to use the expansion as chip. Works great now. Thanks for the help!
Now to open the A570 and see what the battery situation is. Before I do anything, does anybody now know if the A570 will function ok without a battery at all?
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Yes the A570 requires 1MB Chip for most titles.
You might want to look into the internal (http://freenet-homepage.de/x1541/hardware/a570ram.html) 2MB Fast Memory module. I bought one recently (from the author) and it's awesome and easy to install!
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Now everything works great. Even Defender of The Corwn (which worked previously) works better now. The sound would sometimes cut out previously. Not any more. What a great thing that I was able to fix this :)
I looked into that 2mb expansion. Good call! I emailed the author, so hopefully I can grab one of these as well. Thanks again!
As for battery, I opened the unit and tried to peer underneath the cd-rom mech and see if I can see it. I do not see one at all, but it could be there. Or, maybe not. I have never had any luck with cd-rpom mechanisms (dismantling that is) so I am not going to bother.
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The A570 doesn't have a battery as the 500 should have one for RTC. The buffered RAM from the CDTV doesn't exist with the 570 but it's hardly ever used anyway.
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@ Zektor
If you can't find the internal ram expansion for the A570, Supra's RX500 is also compatible. I've run mine with upto 4 Megs of fast, never tried 8 Megs.
The 570 is compatible only with the original CPU clock rate, accelerators will dramatically shorten it's life, if they will boot with it at all. It does work fine with the 68010, but the marginal speed-up is hard to quantify outside of Sysinfo.
EDIT: It works with 2 Megs of chip, too.
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Hey check this site out: http://www.cdtv.org.uk/
There's a bunch of titles that for some reason work with a CDTV but not A570. I don't know why at all. This site might explain why but I just use it to figure out which ones will and won't work. Those ones that don't work, I guess either a Commodore CD32 console or an Amiga 1200 or Amiga 4000(tougher to get going A4000 though) with CD-ROM configured correctly will play ANY CDTV titles as well as CD32 and any Ami-CD format disks. That CDTV logo I think was kept for CD32 games and anything that booted off the CDTV set top model(shown on that website). That's the only thing that'll show on an A570 if you try to boot a CD32 game on it, OR if you have a PAL game on an NTSC Amiga.
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I found one btw and I paid quite a bit for it when you include shipping. Something like $130. I think it's the 1st CD drive ever made for a computer but might be wrong about that. You should be able to find about 20-30 titles for it if you count PAL and NTSC. Psycho Killer and Town With No Name are the favorite 2 games I've found for it so far. Someone told me my A570 was broken in another post when I complained the sound output was low. See you're supposed to put your audio out RCA red & white to this audio-in jack on the A570, then from the A570 to the speakers/home theater receiver you're using with it. I recommend any old computer speakers with it. I don't know maybe something is wrong with mine but I really don't think so. Just a tip if you have problems with not hearing the sound.
Amplified speakers or headphones is what I mean* Also a neat trick I used was I put the sound out to some old computer speakers then out from the headphone jack to the home theater receiver, and that really let me get great sound out of it. Note: you might not have this problem, but if you do, just do this to fix it. It's a lot easier than trying to fix a sound processor.
one last thing* the cd caddies are real fragile, but they're quite easy to replace. one of the push-down releases on one side broke right off from use. It was loose when I got it. Symptom is the disk caddy will not snap in easily you'll have to jiggle it a little bit. But I did a search for "cd caddy" on ebay about 10 seconds after it broke and found one for $8 including shipping! So buy a couple extra cd caddies if you're going to use it a lot. wait till you get it first. the one i ordered had a picture and happened to look identical to the one i had though it didn't say it was a commodore cd caddy. I think there was a uniform size for them.