Amiga CATS developer CD 1.0, IBM Storyteller Live

From: Ethan Dicks <erd_6502_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Mon Apr 28 01:13:01 2003

--- Mark <mark_k_at_totalise.co.uk> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I posted a question about this to an Amiga newsgroup a while ago, but
> no-one there seemed to know much about it.

In a way, I'm not surprised... the CD-TV was not a big seller.
 
> I have a CD-ROM produced by Commodore-Amiga Inc. labelled CATS Developer
> CD V1.0 (CATSCD10). This was probably distributed to registered Amiga
> developers circa 1991.
>
> The disc doesn't contain an ISO 9660 filesystem...

I don't know if this would work with any of the Amiga emulators (like
UAE, etc.), but I expect it _would_ work with a real CD-TV (which is
not a CD-32).

The CD-TV was an Amiga in a black box, styled like a VCR or component
CD-player. It would play audio CDs, CD+G and even CD+MIDI (although
I am only aware of one CD+MIDI disk ever being produced). It should
resemble an Amiga 500 with an A570 CD-ROM drive (more or less) with
some extra libraries in ROM. There's a VFD display on the front that
the 68000 can write to, and an early memory card interface (64K/128K?)
for saving game data, etc. You could get a floppy drive, mouse and
keyboard for it (the floppy was standard Amiga, but black; the mouse
and keyboard were not).

I had one for a while, before it was stolen in a 1990 burglary. I
paid full MSRP of $799 for it. Somewhere, I still have the CD that
came with it, as well as the black caddy. Oh yea... IIRC the drive
is 1X and definitely uses a caddy.

Besides playing audio disks with its built-in ROM-based interface, I
did hook it up to my Amiga 1000 over a parallel cable and built a
boot floppy for it with DNet and the NetKeys handler, so I could drive
it from my regular desktop machine (two CPUs, two monitors, one mouse
and keyboard) to explore the machine. There's some really great
crud in the corners of the demo disk that came in the package.

Thanks for sharing this. It makes me miss my CD-TV (but not enough to
go pay too much on eBay for one. ;-)

-ethan
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Received on Mon Apr 28 2003 - 01:13:01 BST

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