- [Narrator] It's 1991 and that stupid Robin Hood song
has been at number one in the UK forever.
Fortunately, on the bright side, a computer CD revolution
is about to enter the living room of everyone's home,
or at least that was what both
Commodore and Philips' plan was.
That plan may not have worked out as they hoped
but it was the plan.
You could easily be forgiven
for being into the whole retro thing
and yet never having heard of either CDTV or CDi.
Commercially, they were not even success adjacent,
not quite Jaguar levels of failure but it did not go well.
(sniffing)
What's that smell?
Uh-oh, comment section's on fire.
Whoa, calm down Jaguar owners, just a joke.
In hindsight, we can tell why neither CDi or CDTV did well.
They were both aiming for a market
that was never really there.
Both were trying to introduce a new device
into the living room to sit under the TV
next to your video recorder.
The interactive CD media device,
it'd be an encyclopedia,
a source of education and entertainment,
and in the case of CDi,
it'd be something we could even watch video CDs on.
Assuming we buy quite pricey avant garde.
Philips were the first to start
the process of creating their device,
which is not odd considering that, with Sony,
they invented the audio CD.
Philips had been working on the Doomsday Project with Acorn
and created a method of getting data a computer could read
encoded onto a laser disc.
Having developed that technology,
Philips applied it to the CD and created CD-ROM.
Now, some of you may be thinking,
"I thought CDs were digital,
so why couldn't the computer just read
the ones and zeros off that?"
And the answer to that question is, error correction.
If you simply just took the approach of reading
the pits and lands as ones and zeros in a CD,
a small bit of dust, slight scratch,
would render the entire disc basically unreadable.
So you need an error correction scheme
and that's what Philips developed
with laser disk and then transferred to CD.
At a time when most people's hard disks
were a hundred meg or less
and all software came on floppy disks
that maxed out at about 1.4 meg,
a CD with its 160 meg of storage was huge.
Philips had a vision of us all having
complete encyclopedias on CD,
interactive telephone books and yellow pages.
Yeah, young people ask your parents
about what that is,
and basically a wide range of large data sets
and applications, and some games.
And it's not surprising
that Philips envisioned this whole new world
based on just being able to have, well, more storage,
as many applications were limited,
essentially by the size of storage available to them.
You could only distribute so much data.
This was opening up a whole new world for them.
Also, with Philips having been involved in Doomsday,
they'd seen what an interactive reference work
could be like.
Philips envisioned this device as something
different to a home computer or a games console.
It was something the whole family could use.
It would sit under the big TV in the living room
with the whole family gathered around,
learning about, I don't know, history and stuff.
Philips were not the only people to think
that this was a good idea.
Commodore also thought it was a good idea.
So after hearing about CDi,
they took an Amiga 500, slapped a CD-ROM drive on in there,
shoved it in a case that resembled the VCR,
and beat Philips to market.
Bet that went down well with Philips.
When CDi came out,
Philips put quite a bit of marketing spam behind it
with both TV and the print ads.
CDi also managed to attract
a certain amount of coverage in the news media as well.
Commodore followed its usual marketing strategy
for all things Amiga and tried to avoid telling anyone
of the existence of the product whatsoever.
Okay, I exaggerate a little bit,
but not by as much as you would hope
if you had shares in Commodore.
All right, let's get a look at these machines,
starting with the CDi.
Now you can see it's very much going for
a VCR kind of a look.
This is because they intended you to pop it
under the big TV in the living room
and think of it more as a living room kind of device
and not so much a games console or computer.
It's based around Philips' own 68070 CPU,
which is basically a 68,000 with some extra
built in hardware and some performance issues,
although Philips compensated for that by
ramping up the clock speed a fair amount on it.
Graphics wise it had a pallet of 16.7 million colors
with 32,000 of them available onscreen at any one time.
On the sound front, it had an 8 bit sound chip
with the ability to stream 16 bit audio from the CD.
If we look around the back, we can see MPEG1 addon decoder,
which allowed it to play CDi movies
and full motion video games.
The controller for the CDi
from a gaming standpoint was awful.
I mean, just awful.
It's ergonomically bad,
It uses infrared like your TV remote
so it's unresponsive at moments,
button presses get missed.
It's bad.
To be honest, it's even worse than the Jaguar controller.
Well, except doesn't give you RSI.
Now, let's have a look at the CDTV.
Again, this thing looks like a VCR,
only it is an Amiga 500.
I mean, it may not come with a keyboard and a mouse
but it is an Amiga with a CD drive.
You could even get the keyboard and mouse
and floppy drive as an addon.
So you could play regular Amiga games and,
you know, do a bit of word processing on it.
So, spec wise, it's the same as the Amiga 500.
It has a Motorola 68,000 CPU
and the full Amiga custom chipsets.
Things like the TV modulator are built directly into it.
And it also has the Amiga 500 display port as well,
so you could plug in a monitor or a rather posh TV
using the separate red, green, and blue signals
the port could produce.
CDs were loaded into the CDTV using caddies.
Now, if you were not around for when caddies was a thing
and you're thinking, "That looks needlessly awkward."
Yeah, you'd be right.
I have absolutely nothing to say to commend them.
Not a single thing.
If you're wondering if this whole caddy mess
was a uniquely Commodore thing, no, sadly not.
Caddy loading CD drives were pretty common
on most platforms in the early times of CD-ROM.
God alone knows why.
I mean CDs, they're hard to break, they're hard to damage.
So let's wrap them in a small plastic box
that is easy to break and easy to damage,
and the door just snaps off all the damn time.
And if you drop it, a small spring explodes across the room,
rendering the whole caddy completely effing useless.
Oh yeah, and if you broke your caddy
a replacement caddy cost nearly about
the same amount as a game.
Yeah, Caddies were awful.
And if you're wondering,
"Did we just use caddies because it took us a while
to invent CD trays?"
Nope, CD tray based CD-ROM drives came out
the same time as the caddy based ones.
Ahh, right, back to the whole CDTV thing.
Well, as mentioned, CDi's controller was basically awful.
And if you think Commodore was gonna produce
a really good one, no, nope.
They made this.
Yep, drink it in.
Okay, it's not as bad as the CDi one.
I mean, this is at least comfortable to hold in two hands.
You know, it's kind of got a D pad thing going on,
but it's also infrared.
So it also misses key presses and stuff,
and as the batteries go flat, it gets worse.
It's still an awful, awful controller,
but just not as awful as the CDi one.
Thank God you could just plug an Amiga joystick
into this thing and then, you know, enjoy playing a game.
Software.
Why, CDTV got a number of reference works, as did CDi.
CDTV also got a lot of shovelware from A500,
which was basically just the floppy disk version on the CD.
But some standout games did make use of the CD,
Defender of the Crown being one that people
often tend to point out.
CDi got a fair few ported games
as well as a few originals of its own.
Some of those originals were even based on Nintendo IP
in the form of Hotel Mario, Zelda: Wand of Gamelon,
and Link: Faces of Evil.
And, of course, Zelda's Adventure.
Sales of both CDi and CDTV were not going well,
and both companies took a different approach to this.
Commodore decided to cut its losses and stop making CDTV.
They sold off the remaining rather large inventory
by marketing it as an A500 with a CD-ROM drive.
Then added in a black keyboard, mouse, and floppy drive,
and sold as a bundle.
In this form, CDTV sold quite well
until they ran out of stock.
Commodore then went on to make a CD addon for the A500
called the A570, which you can see here.
And they finally released it just in time
to halt production of the A500,
as newer Amigas had been released
and these newer Amigas,
yeah they didn't have a CD addon
So you ended up with the odd situation where
you could buy a CD addon for a machine
that you could no longer purchase.
Very 90's, Commodore.
Philips, who were really heavily invested in CDi,
decided to take a different tack and kept plowing on.
They decided to pivot a little bit
and make out that CDi was more of a games console.
This is their updated version, the CDi 450.
As you can see, it's styled much more like
a traditional games console,
but relatively little else has changed about the hardware.
It is, however, cheaper for Philips to make,
so the price managed to drop a little bit.
And they got rid of the absolutely terrible controller
and replaced it with a moderately all right one, actually.
It's kind of shaped like a game pad,
like on most of the systems,
and it uses a cable rather than the whole infrared thing
which was, you know, quite an improvement.
Otherwise, the CDi would struggle somewhat
to compete with other popular consoles of the time.
So they decided to lean heavily into
the full motion video game craze that was happening.
Now, this did mean that a lot of games
depended on the optional MPEG1 decoder board,
which was a bit of a problem.
Oh, for the time CDi really did do full motion games
quite well compared to other systems.
It's just that, you know,
full motion video games were kind of, well, awful.
Probably one of the reasons
Philips stuck it out with CDi was that
they were not the only manufacturer of CDi systems.
Philips had created CDi as a standard
that they could license out to other manufacturers.
And they brought onboard a fair few,
like LG, Grundig, and Sony.
Sony had even gone so far as to make a handheld CDi
with built-in LCD screen.
You know, that thing must've sold in the tens.
Eventually, after eight years in production,
Philips decided to call time on CDi
and they never released a followup console.
However, the business model that Philips created
of create a platform and then license it out
to third parties to make their own unit
was used again by 3DO,
and they did not make a success of it either.
Now for a video referencing two machines,
you might expect me to do some form of
one versus the other type comparison.
Well, I'm going to subvert expectations and not.
CDi definitely outsold CDTV,
but whether one's better than the other
kind of depends on what you want to get out on the thing,
especially as a retro collector.
I mean, if you're a big fan of the Amiga
and what you want is an Amiga 500
with a CD drive that fits under your TV,
CDTV is a pretty good way to go.
Now, admittedly, if you're one of those collectors,
you're more likely to want a CD32
'cause that gives you an Amiga 1200
that you can stick under a TV with a CD drive
that, you know, looks a bit more like a games console,
but CDTV is still not a bad buy.
If you're not someone who's already into Amigas,
it's probably not the first machine to start with
from the Amiga line.
I mean, there are much cheaper options out there.
I mean, an A500 costs a fraction of what
the CDTV is going to cost you, even a 1200.
Yeah, it's still going to be cheaper than the CDTV.
Now, CDi, on the other hand,
well, there's no one game on it I'd actually recommend that,
"Oh, you have to play that."
It's got a few games that are fine.
It's got some okay,
it's got a lot that are truly awful,
but nothing where I'd go,
"Oh, you definitely must play that."
That being said, though,
if you're a Mario fan who has to have
every single Mario game there is,
then CDTV's definitely got any Mario game
that you may want in your collection.
Same with Link, same with Zelda.
Also, you know, if you're
sufficiently sadomasochistic enough
to be really into full motion video games,
then CDi has got some pretty competent implementation
of early 90s, mid 90s full motion video games.
I mean, yeah, they're still the same games
that were available for every other platform,
but CDi's a convenient way to run them.
You know, one box, plug it into your TV,
put in a disc, away you go.
There isn't configuring about 50 drivers
and trying to emulate a real magic video card
and all the other messing around you have to go for
on a couple of other platforms.
If you are going to buy a CDi
for full motion video games, though,
I would recommend that you get one
with the MPEG decoder card,
or find an MPEG decoder card somewhere,
because a lot of these games really do need it.
Also, if you're a fan of light gun games, CDi's got a few.
And more importantly,
it's got a light gun that actually works on modern TVs,
as it has a little receiver box
and doesn't rely on the beam scanning of the CRT.
If you are into your light gun games,
I'll just give a quick shout out to
a YouTube channel called Gouldfish On Games.
He's done a whole bunch of
really interesting videos on them.
I'll drop a link to his channel in the description below.
Well, that about wraps it up for this video.
If you've made it all the way to the end
I'd like to say thank you very much for watching.
I really appreciate you taking the time,
as apparently, so does YouTube's ranking algorithms.
If you enjoyed it,
why not pop a comment in the section below?
Tell us about your experiences of either CDTV or CDi.
And if you liked it sufficiently,
you can share it with other people that you like, too.
And if you didn't like the video,
well, you can share it with people that you hate.
Also, my thanks go out to the fabulous Mr. Zombiworkshop,
who once again lends his art skills to this episode.
And also, the equally wonderful Mr. Jonny Blanchard,
who was kind enough to lend us a little bit of CDi footage,
as someone broke their upscaler.
Yeah, it was me.
And if you're feeling in the mood
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