Amiga CD32

[bacteria]

This seems the Amiga section, and the console is an Amiga CD32; which is I believe a CD drive slapped onto an Amiga 1200?

 

Question is this, the CD drive is SLLOOOOWWWW. Any way to speed it up and have it working fine - does it use regular PC CD drives, for example, and could the motor be swapped and the Amiga read the discs fine? Ay comments?

[Rybags]

I doubt another drive can be swapped in... I'm not sure it even uses the IDE interface.

 

Even then, the commands would need to be sent to use higher speed - AFAIK the drive in the CD32 only does 1x and 2x.

[+SpiceWare]

Yeah, the CD32 is a 2X drive. That was fast at the time. I've not seen anything about replacing the drive.

 

You'll probably have better luck asking over at Lemon Amiga.

[icbrkr]

Except for a few games, I haven't had to wait more than a few seconds between screens.

 

You want slow, wait for a later-made game for the Neo Geo CD

[madmax2069]

You want slow, wait for a later-made game for the Neo Geo CD

 

NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

[bacteria]

Thanks for the feedback, I posted on Lemon Amiga as suggested, they confirmed the CD can't be changed, hardware and software prohibit it. Worth asking the question though!

[Ze_ro]

Yep. It's a completely proprietary drive. You'll just have to live with it.

 

--Zero

[Princess-Isabela]

Amiga CD-32 had a quite fast load times, don't know why you would like to swap cd-drives for it.

Afteral, this is not Neo Geo CD where you literally can leave the room for a minute or so and be back in time for new match in Last Blade 2 ^_~

Games on CD-32 weren't big in size so the drive was doing what it was supposed to do.

[bacteria]

Fair enough! I'd originally wondered if by using a 4x or 16x CD drive unit if that would have made things load faster, however appears the CD32 was designed for single speed and some games load fine double speed but others don't.

 

I was exploring options!

 

My intention is to open this baby up in the next couple of months and investigate.

[Jess Ragan]

Well, I know that a lot of these old systems are getting SD card peripherals now. The Spectrum has one. The Commodore line has one. Why not the Amiga as well? The only problem is that it may only work with the Amiga computers, not the CD32. You'd probably have to upgrade it to a computer using one of the upgrades, which kind of defeats the point.

 

My personal experience with the Amiga CD32 has been... unsatisfactory. It's very picky about burned CDs, which is infuriating because it's practically the only way you can find games for the damned thing.

[+save2600]

...and, by the time you upgrade a CD32 to near full A1200 status, you've spent a shit-ton of money for a Frankenamigacomputer.

 

Best option if you want a super speedy A500/A1200/CD32 experience is to simply sell/trade your CD32, get yourself a HD or SCSI<>IDE<>CF Flash adapter and use WHDLoad (yes, even CD32 games work on it) on an A1200 or A4000.

[bacteria]

I've already opened up the guts of the system, removed the drive board from the enclosure and modding the drive bay holder. Not documented it yet.

[madmax2069]

I was going to get a CD32 because i could not find a reasonable A1200. but from reading this topic i will probably not get the CD32 and hope for a A1200.

[bacteria]

I bought my CD32 on ebay and it came with compilation CD's containing pretty well all games released. The discs work fine.

[+SpiceWare]

My personal experience with the Amiga CD32 has been... unsatisfactory. It's very picky about burned CDs, which is infuriating because it's practically the only way you can find games for the damned thing.

 

I've picked up a number of games via eBay, but have to agree that I've not had any luck with burned CDs. I suspect that it's due in part to the CDs now being 700MB+ instead of 650MB - from wiki

The 120 mm disc has a storage capacity of 74 minutes of audio or 650 MiB of data. CD-R/RWs are available with capacities of 80 minutes of audio or 737,280,000 bytes (703 MiB), which they achieve by molding the disc at the tightest allowable tolerances specified in the Orange Book CD-R/CD-RW standards.

 

I've tried to find the older 650MB discs at the store but haven't been able to. I could probably order some, but haven't gotten around to it.

Edited August 5, 2010 by SpiceWare

[Ze_ro]

Well, I know that a lot of these old systems are getting SD card peripherals now. The Spectrum has one. The Commodore line has one. Why not the Amiga as well? The only problem is that it may only work with the Amiga computers, not the CD32. You'd probably have to upgrade it to a computer using one of the upgrades, which kind of defeats the point.

You might want to check out the HxC Floppy Drive Emulator. It's basically an SD card reader that plugs into a floppy interface, with buttons and an LCD screen for changing disk images. It's made specifically with the Amiga and Atari ST in mind.

 

But, yeah... to use this on a CD32, you'd need a floppy interface...

 

...and, by the time you upgrade a CD32 to near full A1200 status, you've spent a shit-ton of money for a Frankenamigacomputer.

 

Best option if you want a super speedy A500/A1200/CD32 experience is to simply sell/trade your CD32, get yourself a HD or SCSI<>IDE<>CF Flash adapter and use WHDLoad (yes, even CD32 games work on it) on an A1200 or A4000.

If you're just looking to play Amiga games on the cheap and easy, the best way to do it on a CD32 is via the pirate compilation disks that include hundreds of A500 games on a CD.

 

In the long run, it's a better and cheaper solution to go with an Amiga 1200. They're fairly easy to find on eBay, and they're far easier to find expansions for (Keep in mind that you will really want some sort of RAM expansion at the very least, as WHDLoad isn't too fun with only 2MB).

 

I've already opened up the guts of the system, removed the drive board from the enclosure and modding the drive bay holder. Not documented it yet.

I'm not sure what you hope to accomplish with this... if faster CD access is your only motivation, I expect you'll be disappointed. What situations are you in that the speed is a problem?

 

However, if you plan to go ahead with it anyways, here's some information that might be helpful: Some sources claim that the CD32 uses an MKE (Matsushita) interface, like those found on the earlier Sound Blaster cards. If that's the case, you might have luck interfacing an MKE CD-ROM drive (though I imagine such a drive would be very difficult to find, and MKE drives faster than 2x might not even exist), or by adapting it to IDE with a circuit like this.

 

On further investigation however, I'm skeptical about the MKE claims. Here's a page out of the CD32 schematics that shows the CD interface:

The CD-ROM is directly controlled by the Akiko chip, and looking at the pinouts listed, it doesn't seem to resemble MKE pinouts at all. It also includes a "DOOR" signal so it can tell when the lid has been opened... that's certainly not part of the MKE spec.

 

--Zero

[bacteria]

No, i'm rehousing the CD32 system into my project and doing some modding to make the drive unit smaller.

 

I don't recall seeing a switch, like you normally get on drive units to indicate if the door is open or closed, so where do I connect a switch to tell the system if the drive unit is open or closed (not using the original casing BTW)?