Just got my hands on a Amiga CD32

[arion]

If you haven´t heard of it

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_CD32

Anyway i just got mine in the mail yesterday and it´s a blast to be able to play great amiga games like
Chaos Engine and Pinball Fantasies from a cd instead of a floppy I´ve also had the chance to play Banshee wich is an awesome shump.

http://www.mobygames.com/game/banshee

I must admit the controller felt kinda weird at first and in fact i held it upside down when i first tried it. But
once i got used to it it´s pretty comfortable.

I also tried the 1st person shooter Gloom..hmm familiar sounding name anyway graphically it´s somewhere between wolfeinstein 3d and doom altho you don´t see the gun and can´t switch between guns either. But what i found most impressive is that it offers 2 player coop on split screen.

I also got the games that came bundled with it and if there ever was a reason for the cd32 limited lifespan it would be that commodore chose some real stinkers to sell with their hardware.

Here is a quote from the review for Dangerous Streets

I know what you are thinking. You think I am exaggerating, don’t you? I am not. This game – and I am not joking – could single-handedly destroy the credibility of the CD32, beyond repair. It is the lead game in the bundle that most people will get their machine in (it is actually called the ‘Dangerous Streets Pack’ for God’s sake), and hence probably the first one they will play. If they then tackle Oscar and the actually quite-good-ish-but-none-too-friendly Diggers, they will probably take the machine straight back to the shop there and then demand an SF2-pack SNES and two hundred quid back. You are not going to believe how dreadful this is, but I am going to explain it to you.

Full review here
http://amigareviews.classicgaming.gamespy.com/home.htm

and yes that is a horrible game

[ott0bot]

Wow very cool. I've never played the cd version. Do you know it any on the shmups listed here are available on cd. I read that you can get a floppy add-on, can you play the older Amiga games with it? There are some amazing games I always wanted to play for Amiga, but never had the opportunity. How much did you pay for it anyway?

[Ivo]

I also got the games that came bundled with it and if there ever was a reason for the cd32 limited lifespan it would be that commodore chose some real stinkers to sell with their hardware.

Diggers was good, and Oscar was decent, if you got that bundle.

Commodore was already going down anyway, but yes, putting Dangerous Streets as a pack-in? I never played it (fortunately) but it was widely bashed.

I haven't yet played Banshee, but I want to someday. The Stardust remake is excellent as well.

Ivo.

[arion]

Wow very cool. I've never played the cd version. Do you know it any on the shmups listed here are available on cd. I read that you can get a floppy add-on, can you play the older Amiga games with it? There are some amazing games I always wanted to play for Amiga, but never had the opportunity. How much did you pay for it anyway?

As for shumps made for the cd 32

Banshee
Disposable Hero
Jetstrike
Overkill
Seek and Destroy
Project X

and i´d assume you can boot games from a floppy but i havent given that much thougt since im waiting for an Amiga 500 aswell

Also i did find this torrent yesterday

http://www.mininova.org/tor/181425

i have yet to try burning those cd´s it but if it works then it´s just way to awesome
Edit: They do work so if i don´t reply soon im busy:P

I was lucky enough to get mine for 20£ on ebay.co.uk in fact i paid more for shipping.

[Ivo]

Some comments...

Banshee - This one has a very good reputation, I haven't played it but it's probably quite good.
Jetstrike - not your typical shooter, you can rotate and go in any direction, lots of planes to choose and so on. Quite unique in fact.
Overkill - a very good Defender "clone" / "remake"
Seek and Destroy - I have played only a bit of this on the PC, it's sort of like top-down Desert Strike. Sort of.
Project X - a Gradius style shooter, very hard and very nice quality game.

"and i´d assume you can boot games from a floppy but i havent given that much thougt since im waiting for an Amiga 500 aswell "

You can plug an external floppy drive if you have a sort of expander thing. Look up SX-1 or SX-32 or something (see the wikipedia article). Basically this plugs in the one expansion port of the CD32 and has a bunch of ports for keyboards, external floppy drives and so on. One of them not only expands out the ports, but also has a 68030 chip to "replace" the 68020 of the CD32, I think.


"i have yet to try burning those cd´s it but if it works then it´s just way to awesome
Edit: They do work so if i don´t reply soon im busy:P"

I never tried, but I think the CD32 doesn't have any protection. Those compilations must be convenient! Maybe I should try burning one myself.

BTW, The pad is comfortable, even if it is weird, but the D-pad on it isn't particularly durable (I trashed two back in the day playing regular games).

I think all in all it's not at all a bad piece of hardware for when it came out (same goes for the A1200 - but that had a big drawback in the controllers mostly just using one fire button).
The pads should have been more sturdy, granted, but I mean the processing power etc. For example the boot scene of the CD32 is very fancy and full of color, perhaps better than that of Saturn or PS1 (which I'm sure could pull out similar stuff or better, they have more power under the hood - but for some reason they decided not to do anything fancy there).

I think it's quite fair to say that no console without first party games made it out very well in that generation. In the CD32 case, which was very much a pioneer, every third party company thought it was perfectly fine to just port their A500 / A1200 floppy games to CD32 without doing any changes whatsoever (other than doing away with disk swapping). That's not really significant, considering many of the games were old and not all of them had prices reflecting that (to be fair there was a trend of putting 2 games on 1 CD as well). Not even upgrading the controls to use a button to jump? I can tell you how crappy it is to use a direction pad up to jump (in a joystick it works reasonably ok, but not on a gamepad)...
To make it worse (of the ports), many of the best games of the Amiga were mouse control games, which were poor fits.

Of course it wouldn't have mattered that much in hindsight as Commodore was going down anyway (I'm guessing some companies might actually have proper games being worked on, that got canceled as the future of the CD32 made itself apparent).
But still, we all know that what makes a strong console are the games, so the CD32 needed its own share... Games that used the extra storage (not just for FMV in crap games ) and the gamepad would have been welcome back then.

Ivo.

[arion]

I've burned a few games without any problems and nero works fine for burning cd32 games.

You can find good games here such as Banshee and many other free to download. I'd also recommend giving lotus trilogy and Pinball Fantasies/Illusions a go.

http://www.back2roots.org/CDs/Games/

and the compilations i mentioned before are also great particularly the 200 game one. The menu plays music and if you leave it for a while it starts playing some nice looking amiga animations and also there is a screenshot and a description for all the games. In the larger compilations some games don´t have screenshots or descriptions but thats understandable since there must have been to much work to add image and text to every game considering the later compilations have 350, 444, and 888 games

so yeah i´d recomend digging up the cd32 again and in worst case plug a genesis pad in it but im sure you knew that´s possible already

[Ivo]

You can find good games here such as Banshee and many other free to download. I'd also recommend giving lotus trilogy and Pinball Fantasies/Illusions a go.

I have Lotus Trilogy and Pinball Fantasies original from back in the day in fact

Are you sure plugging a Genesis pad works well? I know the "plug" is the same, and when I had a MegaDrive* I used to try Amiga joysticks on it (didn't work very well, as you can imagine from the lack of buttons). I actually played a bit of Sonic with an Amiga joystick, for that game it worked ok

But anyway, will a Genesis pad read all the buttons on the CD32 (although, not many games use all the buttons I guess)? How did that work for you, I'm quite interested in knowing that?

Ivo.

(got rid of it to get the CD32, in fact. Don't regret the "swap" very much or at all as the MegaDrive games were quite expensive in Portugal, and I had played Sonic 1 and 2 by then anyway Even though the CD32 didn't fare very well)

[arion]

The genesis pad works great except in the rare cases the game actually uses all buttons like pinball fantasies. Lotus Trilogy for example should work with the genesis pad seeing as the game only uses the dpad and one button. And for the 200 game compilation it works on every classic amiga game. I knew the genesis pad worked since i played alot of games on the Amiga 500 with it

Aside from the fact that i had to use a little bit of tape to hold down the dpad on my cd32 controller it is very easy on the thumbs. But it could have been made better.

[Ivo]

The genesis pad works great except in the rare cases the game actually uses all buttons like pinball fantasies. Lotus Trilogy for example should work with the genesis pad seeing as the game only uses the dpad and one button. And for the 200 game compilation it works on every classic amiga game. I knew the genesis pad worked since i played alot of games on the Amiga 500 with it

Aside from the fact that i had to use a little bit of tape to hold down the dpad on my cd32 controller it is very easy on the thumbs. But it could have been made better.

Maybe a 6-button Genesis pad will work with "all buttons", although of course the placement of the shoulders isn't perfect (EDIT: No it won't, unless you re-map some of the interior circuitry. Nevermind )

Thanks for the tip anyway one button is more than enough and I do have a working CD32 pad for the ones that need more buttons

Ivo.

[arion]

btw it does seem that the cd32 doesnt accept all brands of cdr´s i just bought a 25cd bundle from Verbatim and burned a few games and not one of them booted. But the brand i have had no problem with is Tdk figures that brand is more expensive