Amiga CD32

~ the goodbye ~

Commodore announced the CD32 at the Science Museum in London on 16 July 1993, which tells you where the company thought its remaining market was. British magazines carried it as a national event. It went on sale in Europe on 17 September, with Australia and Canada following, and the pitch was straightforward: an Amiga 1200 with the floppy drive replaced by a CD-ROM and the keyboard replaced by a pad, at a price a parent might agree to.

Inside it was a Motorola 68EC020 at 14.18 MHz, two megabytes of chip RAM and the AGA chipset, plus a custom chip called Akiko that handled the chunky-to-planar conversion the Amiga's graphics architecture otherwise made expensive. That made it the first 32-bit CD console on the market, ahead of the 3DO in Europe and well ahead of Sony. The claim was true and it mattered less than Commodore hoped, because most of the software was existing Amiga 1200 and Amiga 500 titles pressed onto a disc, often without using the CD for music or video at all.

I was nine when this shipped and the Amiga that existed in Turkey was the 500, sitting in other people's living rooms with a box of floppies beside it. Nobody I knew ever saw a CD32. It was not sold here in any organized way, and the machine's whole commercial life fits inside one school year. What I know about it I know the way you know about a car model that was withdrawn before it reached your country, which is to say from photographs and other people's arguments.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the good christmas ~

It had one genuinely strong season. Over Christmas 1993 the CD32 accounted for 38 percent of all CD-ROM drive sales in Britain, outselling Sega's Mega-CD. That figure is doing something sneaky, since it counts a games console against PC drives, but it is still the only period where Commodore's last product outperformed anything.

The launch bundle was Diggers and Oscar. A later pack swapped one out for Dangerous Streets, a fighting game that Amiga Power had rated at 3 percent, which the press treated as evidence that nobody at Commodore was steering. There was an MPEG module that clipped onto the back and turned the console into a Video CD player for about two hundred pounds, shown at CeBIT in 1994 and largely stranded by what happened next.

~ the patent ~

The American launch was set for late February or early March 1994, at $399 with two pack-in games. It never happened, and the reason had nothing to do with the machine. Cadtrak held US patent 4,197,590, which covered using the XOR operation to draw a cursor over a background without destroying it. Commodore owed ten million dollars in royalties and missed the deadline. A federal judge responded with an injunction barring the company from importing anything into the United States at all.

Consoles built in Commodore's Philippine factory for the US launch stayed in the Philippines, because the debts owed to the facility's owners had to be settled before anything could move. Imported units trickled across the Canadian border into American mail-order shops, which is the only way the machine reached the country. Commodore International declared bankruptcy shortly after, and the CD32 was discontinued on 29 April 1994, roughly eight months after it went on sale.

~ what got buried with it ~

Commodore UK kept producing components and software during the long bankruptcy proceedings, including the MPEG module that Commodore International never formally released. That is the shape of the whole ending: a company already legally dead, with a subsidiary still shipping accessories for a console nobody could buy.

The CD32 had a second career nobody planned. In 1993 the London Transport Museum installed 109 of them to run its interactive exhibits, driving an Underground simulator and multi-language displays through an interface box built by a small firm in Hampshire. From 1994 to 1997 the Wall Street Institute ran language-learning centers on CD32s with floppy drives bolted on to save student progress. A games console that lived seven months in shops spent years in museums and classrooms, which is a better run than the retail number suggests and not the one Commodore was hoping for.

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