What's the story about the multimedia era?

[Crom00]

CDTV and CDI failed becuase to do multimedia to an acceptable level you needed at least a PS1 spec machine consisting of:

Fast processor, somekind of 3d hardware, full 24bit display (not 32 or 64 colorsa out of 4096), 16 bit sound, fast cd drive. The PS1 was the machine that hit the acceptable spec for a reasonable price and that was 1995-1996. So Commodore was trying to leverage aging 1985 technology and wrapping it around a concept that really needed 1996 era tech to work well.

If aga had been introduced with the Amiga 3000 and CDTV with 16 bit dsp and 2X cd then you would have had an attention getter. But they were simply trying to charge as much as possible for A500 class tech.

I puchased one from Commodore usa during the firesale for about $250 (months before cd32 was launched) and the design of the system was great. Just too slow and underpowered for what it needed to do. You could see the potential though.

[Crom00]

One thing I liked about that era was the add-in decoder card.

The cd32 had a great implementation of the FMV concept. But to expect the user to spend $300 on a console, then almost $300 more for a FMV that got you DIGITAL vhs quality movies as a stretch.

PS1 was such a good implementation of this era technology becuase in game FMV was easily MPEG1 quality as the built in hardware was 24 bit. I even had a dongle that allowed me to play VCD discs. This was very polular in Asia as when over there you could get any movie on vcd for like 10=20 cents.