Magnetic Pages Article | 1993-10-14 | 5KB | 20 lines
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[6";32;41m Amiga CD 32
[0m& Has Commodore got it right with the
Amiga CD 32?& The Amiga CD, for those who have&been bush for the last couple of&months, is Commodore's latest crack at&the games console market. The unit&itself looks like a games console but&it's for CDs only with no port for&cartridges. Technically it's an Amiga&1200 but without the keyboard, mouse&or disk drive but with a CD player and&games controller. Specs wise it's&great news for the gamers. It's also&expandible into a true Amiga computer&by the addition of keyboards and disk
drives etc.& The thing that caught my eye though&was MPEG graphics which will allow the&machine to play over an hours video&off one CD. Great I thought, until I¬iced this needed an add-on before&you can have it. This ain't so great&if the price for it, as reported in&Visual Intensity, is around about that&of a low-end video recorder. Think&about it. Would you buy a video&machine that can only play videos and¬ record stuff from the telly? And&that can only play one hour of video&at that? The only advantage MPEG has&over a standard video recorder is&instant access to anywhere on the CD.&MPEG's real use will be for video&clips in games and multi-media&software, not as a replacement for the
home video machine.& Incredibly you can't just plug a&floppy drive into the Amiga CD. An&"expansion module" is needed first.&This is either a major oversight on&Commodore's part or a means of&preventing normal Amiga software from&being used on the machine, or for the&CDs to be copied. Gamers deserve a way&of saving scores or game positions&considering how much they're going to&have to fork out for this machine but&it's designers don't seem to have
considered this.& And so to the question asked at the&beginning of this article. Consider&the machines that Commodore has had&success with over the years. First&there was the Pet series, then the Vic&20, then the Commodore 64, the Amiga&and now the AGA Amigas. Then consider&the rest. The C16, the Plus 4, the&SX64, the C128, the CDTV, that games&machine built around the C64 and no&doubt quite a few more I've forgotten.&Perhaps the C128 should be in the&successful list but all the others
were definitely just also-rans.& What made the successful ones sell&was their obvious advance in&technology over the standard Commodore&machine of their day. The rest, like&the Amiga CD 32, were just variations&on what was already available.&Existing owners of Commodore computers&couldn't see them as upgrades and they%won't see the Amiga CD as one either.# So the mass market for the Amiga&CD, karaoke bars aside, is games&players and only games players. And&it'll be way too expensive for the&majority of them. Whether Commodore&will capture the Nintendo generation&as they swap going home from school&via their mates house to play a Mario&game with going home from work via the&pub to play an X rated MPEG CD is&anyone's guess. But somehow I have my
doubts.& If Commodore want to capture a mass&market though they should be bringing&out a range of Amigas with built in PC&compatibility and calling them the&Amiga 386, Amiga 486 and so on. Now&those would ship into homes, and by
the thousands.& But if by some fluke the Amiga CD&does take off then us poor Amiga&computer owners will never be able to&say anymore that it's not just a games&machine. It's no win for us either
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