CDTV 1st use and video bypass
I have always wanted a CDTV, and now finally thanks to my wife and John McDermott I have one (thanks)
OK so just playing around with it so far and learning as much as i can, as you can see the CDTV was make to fit into your living room as a multimedia centre intergrated with your Hifi stack system and VCR.
I think it is fair to say that the CDTV was way ahead of it's time, released March 1991 it allowed us to listen to music, play games, watch videos and to learn from it's interactive media library. It is basically an Amiga A500 with a single speed CD drive. The wireless controllers are pretty cool and work well enough as long as it has a good line of sight.
I have found the CDTV to be pretty straight forward to use and a bit of fun, I also see a lot of potential for the machine, add a mouse/joystick adaptor, an 8mb memory card with a CF card, 3.1 kickstart and version 2.30 extended roms and you will have access to WHDLoad via WB3.1 :) pretty sweet huh.
A problem that I have run into is that after 36 hours of use (probably the 1st real use this machine has had in years) the video module failed, when this happens it also stops the RGB port from working as well :(, looking into this it seems to be quite a problem and the video modules are not as common as you might hope, but all is not lost as you can bypass the video module this this very easy hack :) (yay me! lol)
So now we have a picture again, lets take a look at speeds, boom!!! yeah you read that right 541 Dhrystones or 0.56 Mips of power :D,
All of this while the single speed CD drive cranks out 142,417 Bytes per second :O
I will run this again once i have the extra memory installed. I will update this post once I have had some more time to mess around with the system and cleaned up the case etc, so for now, thanks for reading
Cheers, Justin
