TITLE : New CD Drive For A12OO/4OOO AUTHOR : Amiga Format TYPE : Serious News DATE : May 1994 STOP THE REVOLUTION WE WANT TO GET ON ! THE BIGGEST NEWS at the CeBIT '94 show was the first public show- ing of the external CD-ROM drive for the A1200 which was introduced as `the CD³² expansion for A1200'. This was obviously a last minute decision since the press pack contained no information about it. It turns out the device shown was indeed a prototype, although the A1200 CD-ROM is expected to be in shops in Germany by the end of May around DM 500 - which points at a £199 price in the UK. The A1200 CD-ROM is identical in appearance to the CD³² drive except that instead of the CD³²'s wolf-black, it's colour matched to the A1200. The CD1200 connects to the A1200 trough the expansion port underneath the A1200. An interface module is plugged in and the CD-ROM connects to it with a cable which is threaded trough the expansion port under and behind the floppy drive. The whole interface set-up is proprietary and supports the fast throughput needed to access the drive. The power to the CD-ROM comes from a separate power supply. Since the expansion slot is occupied, no turbo cards or other expansion can be plugged in. A SIMM socket on the CD-ROM will take extra memory, most likely a 4 Mb card. The drive contains the AIKIKO chip for full compatibility with the CD³². AIKIKO converts PC chunky and Amiga Planar colour modes. How, or for that matter if, the MPEG module will connect to the A1200 is unclear, since its expansion slot is already occupied. It appears that `at this time' MPEG will not be feasible although `with constant miniaturisation it might be possible to integrate the MPEG modules in future models of the A1200. This speculation, although plausible, has not been confirmed. Otherwise the CD1200 drives' specs match those of the CD³². This means it's double-speed multi-session drive. CD³² games do run on the A1200 with the CD-ROM attached, although some incompatibilities have been spotted. A few of the newer CD³² games appear to dislike the A1200's Fast RAM expansion on a PCMCIA card! Once the PCMCIA card is remove the games run without problems. This points to a possible bus contention or even a bus overload. It remains to be seen how this problem an be solved. But since PCMCIA RAM is only 16-bit, and it actually slows down an A1200, these cards are not common, and the CD1200's SIMM sockets allow for alternative memory expansion. At CeBIT, the CD-ROM drive was controlled with appeared to a preliminary version of AmigaDOS 3.1. The new DOS has CDFileSystem, thus both CDTV and CD³² drives are supported. With Commodore claiming to have a CD³² drive for the Amiga 4000 machines `by the end of 94' it's only a matter of time before all Amigas can join the CD revolution. The extra expansion capability of the big box machines means that A4000 CD drives will have Full Motion Video (FMV) compatibility built in. The CD1200 got its UK debut on April 10th at the ECTS (European Computer Trade Show). It was placed in the corner of the busy Commodore suite unheralded, unattended and apparently unloved. Commodore's UK MD David Pleasance made much of the fact that the CD1200 was not, and never would be, Full Motion Video capable. Mr Pleasance is a great advocate of FMV, and he has stated several times, including within this magazine, that he would not be happy to market a unit that was not capable Of running video CDs. It is unclear whether the decision to put CD1200 on sale in the is something Mr Pleasance is happy about, or whether he is working under instructions from Commodore International in the US. Whatever the case, CD1200 was not given the fantare it deserved on its first UK airing and rather than rushing the product on the market to meet clamouring demands of the A1200 owners, Commodore UK are giving a September on sale date. Amiga Format - May '94