From: peteru@hydra.maths.unsw.EDU.AU ()
Subject: Re: Insider Info about CDTV
Organization: school of Mathematics UNSW
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 1992 12:31:11 GMT

In article <1992Sep23.162905.17775@coli.uni-sb.de> leibrock@fsinfo.cs.uni-sb.de (Gerhard Leibrock) writes:
>hello,
>some weeks ago i did buy an amiga cdtv to have full access to cdroms.

Congratulations, an excellent choice.

>but i must say that i feel kind of lonely with this device.

You shouldn't be. As far as I know C= started _really_ selling CDTV in
July 1992 when they practicaly halved the price. Now there are many special
offers available. In the us you buy A3000 and get a free CDTV and ParNet
cable as well as Fred Fish Collection on CD-ROM. In UK you can trade in
your A500 for a CDTV+keyboard+mouse+disk drive (and possibly other gadgets
as well). So you see, there will be a LOT of CDTV's around pretty soon.

>the manual is nothing more than a bad joke and the welcome cd
>has problems playing the speech (one channel faster than the other...)

Agreed, the docs and CD are pretty embarassing, but I had no probs with
the sound. BUT, due to a cock up somewhere down the line my CDTV came
with the Welcome Disk in German. Not much use in Australia, is it? It
took about a month to get an English version, and by then I figured
enough about the box not to bother that much with the CD.

>ok, nethertheless i did want to upgrade my cdtv a little, but there
>is no hardware available for this ,amiga`.

You should be able to find a lot of upgrade kits from what I hear and
see. Australia is generaly way behind as far as C= goes, but even we
have upgrade kits available.

>as i did take a look in the rom i did see some strange device
>names like cdtv.device, cdg.device and some other libraries.
>ok, is said to myself no way to upgrade to 2.x without loosing
>your cdrom drive.

I'm not quite sure how you went through the ROMs, but physicaly looking
at the motherboard there is a standard looking 1.3 ROM as well as two
smaller ROMs, I assume they hold the CDTV specific stuff and the big
chipie is just 1.3 and so it is likely you could drop in 2.x instead.

>well, questining cbm for advice and docs for the devices was
>never answered, so i would please you outside to help me
>how to read music data, graphics and other things from cds.

Strange, CBM Australia were unusually quick to respond to my request for
info. Maybe they actually NEED more pple to write stuff so they get the
edge over CD-I (but that doesn't belong in here).

They sent me three volumes of information:

CDTV Developer Notes:	Licenses & Forms
			General Articles
			Technical Articles

They contain lots of usefull info, including addresses of companies that
will do your CD-ROM pre-mastering and production runs. It has information
on how to install a switch to make the CDTV switchable between NTSC and
PAL in hardware as well as the include files for cdtv.device. There are
examples of code that will play specific tracks and also read logical
sectors. And heaps more info.

I suggest you get in touch with C= in your country and ONLY talk to pple
from developer support. It worked for me :-)

>gerhard leibrock, neuhaeuselserstr. 12, w-6654 kirkel 2
>leibrock@fsinfo.cs.uni-sb.de


Peter Urbanec				  peteru@hydra.maths.unsw.oz.au
University of New South Wales		s1013734@cs.unsw.oz.au
Sydney, Australia
		The only sin is stupidity  - Machiavelli
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.programmer