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Coldfire Amiga project.
An Interview With......
Guy Wright
He is responsable for the CDTV welcome disk which is the one title every CDTV owner must have (And should have), He also worked wrote the only known program for the CDTV CR prototypes, The CDTV CR Welcome disk. I will now pass over to Guy...
If you have a question you would like to ask Guy then you can, Please fill in the submition form at the bottom of this page, The answers will be posted here within the week.
And now the interview...
The First E-Mail.
I just ran across your site and was quite amused and gratified and a little surprised to see that people are still using and interested in CDTVs.
For better or worse I was one of those contractors who worked in Commodore's
"Special Projects" group developing the CDTV.
Originally hired by Gail to do the developer documentation I ended up doing a lot of other things as needed and eventually I was assigned to create the first Welcome Disc - which I'm
still rather proud of (in spite of leaving an invoice in one of the
directories and a set of fonts that Commodore had to pay dearly for).
In fact, I produced a second Welcome Disc for the DCTV-2 or CR after the
special projects group was disbanded, but it was never released.
The Main interview.
Oliver: What are you doing now? Guy: I mostly write these days. I've done articles on Tom's Hardware, for DV Magazine, Cadence, etc.If you didn't already know, I started as Technical Editor on RUN Magazine (VIC-20/C-64s) in 1983. In 1985 I became founding Editor-in-Chief of Amiga World (when I met Gail, RJ, and all the other original Amgia team before the launch - but that's another story).
When I left Amiga World in '89 I wrote for Amiga+ and a few other publications and then Gail called and asked me if I would write the developer docs for Baby.
Originally, I was supposed to work at home (New Hampshire) and go down to West Chester every once in a while - eventually I was living down there and only got home once or twice a month.
I should point out that I'm not really a hardware geek and don't consider
myself to be much of a programmer either. I didn't solder anything or write
any code for the firmware. I did program the Welcome Disc (and Welcome Disc
2 for the CDTV-CR) and created most of the graphics and animations on the
Welcome Disc. I also built most of the demo discs we used at shows and
conferences.
Here's a little known fact: Pink Floyd actually did the music
for some of those demo discs and one of the early commercials. David Rosen,
our marketing person, was supervising the recording for a voice over for the
first CDTV commercial at a studio in Hollywood. Pink Floyd (or at least a
few of the band members) happened to be there at the same time, (friends of
the studio owner I think). Anyway, he got them to bang out a quick
instrumental piece for background music.
I'm actually quite proud of those demo discs since a lot of hard-core Amiga
developers saw those demos and assumed that the CDTV was using a lot of
special new hardware.
I actually had people tell me "You just can't do that
sort of thing on an Amiga 500. It must have different components." At least
the demos served to get people excited about working on a "new" machine.
Oliver: Do you know how many CDTV CR`s there are? We know of 6 now (The 6th being yours).
Guy: Somehow the number 6 sticks in my mind -
I had a hell of a time getting mine in the first place but managed
to convince them I needed it for pictures for the Welcome Disc 2.
Originally, I was supposed to get a shell only, but Jeff Porter managed to
wangle a working model for me. There were probably a dozen board-only
prototypes in the labs used for testing but only a few complete versions -
mostly used for demos.
I think there were also a second handful of units
made for Europe demos. If there were enough cases in existence they could
probably have assembled maybe a dozen actual working units after things fell
apart.
The first set of cases actually were slightly wrong - the drive doors
weren't quite big enough so the drawer wouldn't eject unless you pulled the
door lip on the case up. I know there were a few of those sent out for
demos.
I believe there is also one (very rare) albino out there somewhere (a beige case).
Oliver: Could you tell us about Commodore`s Special Projects devision..
guy: The original CDTV team was sort of scattered about the country (and world
sometimes) and only a handful of people showed up at the Commodore plant
every day.
It was an exciting time and had some strange elements. For
example, the special projects section was separate from the rest of
Commodore - financially, emotionally, and even physically. We had our own
entrance at the very back of the Commodore plant and a small two floors area
that had originally been warehouse space.
When we went to lunch we had to
walk literally about 1/2 a mile through two massive (and later empty)
warehouses, through the assembly factory floor, through the Q&A department,
and finally into the main Commodore offices where we'd come up in the back
of customer support (where Andy Finkle and the others worked) from there we
could get to the Commodore cafeteria. We were about as far away from the
main hardware R&D department as you could get and almost never went over
there.
Oliver: Ohhh, Very top secret :) Commodore were like a little government werent they
:)
Guy: Yes, the CBM building is like a fortress. I think a lot of that was holdover
from Jack Tramiel days who was fairly paranoid. You've got to pass through a
guarded main gate, cameras are everywhere, and once inside just about every
door has magnetic locks and keys (different for different sections) and even
more cameras inside the building. R&D/engineering was the toughest area to
get into - even if you worked there. There were guards at every exit and if
you wanted to take anything out you had to have an equipment pass signed by
appropriate people.
Almost no one knew what we were working on and we weren't supposed to say anything to anyone at the beginning. Obviously, people learned about the project and occasionally there was friction (or envy I think). For example, we had David Rosen who was our own marketing person and Curt Gangee (not sure of the spelling) our own sales person and I know that there were fights about turning over CDTV sales and marketing to the regular Commodore bunch.
Oliver: Not wanting to let go of your babys huu? :) very, Ermm, cute..
Guy: As far as not wanting to turn over sales and marketing to the regular CBM
bunch - would YOU trust Commodore's regular marketing people to launch a new
product? I used to joke that Commodore couldn't effectively market a cure
for death if they had one. Even within Commodore the sales and marketing
group was a joke. Granted they were thwarted at every turn by upper
management but still, most of their efforts were laughable. At least in the
U.S.
We also had to submit special requests for equipment we needed (and even pay full retail price for Commodore gear!). There was also a battle about Commodore's Q&A wanting to be in the testing loop. We also had to make special requests if we wanted to ask for software help (I had a lot of trouble with some of the demo discs and had to ask Andy and Caroline for help sometimes working out deep problems with the OS - more on that later).
Anyway. Gail Wellington headed up the team and was there most of the time
along with her secretary/girl Friday Louise (the unsung heroine of the team
who booked all our flights, filled out expense reports, organized every
meeting, and acted as mother for the team). Gail was amazing. She made 99%
of the decisions, settled arguments, and really drove the project to
completion. For some unknown reason Nolan Bushnel was hired and was
theoretically in charge of the project but we only met with him a few times
and he didn't really have much to do with the day-to-day work. Maybe he ran
interference with Medi Ali or something (Medi was a real pr#ck by the way).
So Gail really was the driving force.
Don Gilbrath, the mad genius., worked on the hardware and did a lot of flying off to the far east. Two Steves were his right hands (Steve Krekman - who everyone called Krek and I forget the other Steve's last name - he's in the Easter egg list though). Krek was the soldering iron guy and the other Steve was Don's more rational half and the voice of hardware reason. Don was always coming back from Japan or Korea with boxes of components and would say stuff like, "We should put this in or we could add this feature or use this different remote" (the remote went through about a dozen changes) and Steve would tell him why we couldn't or how much trouble it would cause. Later they hired Kaori (don't know the last name) a Japanese girl to help out.
Don and Steve also did most of the communicating with Carl Sassenrath - particularly when some of the hardware changed. Things got so hectic toward the end that Carl refused to take any phone calls unless they were absolutely critical (he was working out in California while he was trying to get his new home finished).
Mike Kawahara handled most of the developer technical support. That turned out to be more than a full-time job (more on that later).
There were also other people and groups outside of Commodore who contributed. For example, at the beginning I worked with a UI design team located up in Massachusetts. There was also a team that built the emulator (which never worked very well). Jim Sachs did a lot of the artwork (he did the main screens). I also contracted with Martin Hash (Hash Animations) and David (damn I can't remember his last name either - I must be getting old - David did some great animations for the prototype Welcome Disc that were later cut) and the guy who created Director-2 for the Amiga. I had him build a custom version of Director-2 for specifically for CDTV and the Welcome Disc. Reichart also worked on some of the animation and video stuff. And Gene (someone) helped out with some Welcome Disc stuff (although his code never seemed to work properly).
Like I said, I was hired to put together the developer documentation but ended up a lot deeper. I was sort of the beta tester (well, more like alpha tester). Don's hardware and Carl's middleware would come together and I'd get a spec sheet. I'd start to pretty it up and run into some problem so I'd call Gail - "I understand how this works, but how are people supposed to save a game to the smart card? Or erase saves they don't want?" (the original CDTV was supposed to have smart cards) I would ask in all innocence. Then Gail would realize that no one had thought that through. She asked me to put together all the questions I could think of and we had a big meeting. I think it took the wind out of everyone's sails a bit. There were tons of user interface issues that no one had considered. Silly things like "How can you select an item from a pull down list using only the stupid arrow keys on the remote?" Gail realized that the CDTV UI had to be a lot different from a traditional Amiga and that you couldn't just port an existing Amiga app to CDTV. Developers would have to redesign their UIs for everything.
We had a developer conference in Atlanta early on and Gail asked me to do a presentation on UI issues. It was like a bomb went off in the room. The developers went nuts when I told them no keyboard and no mouse meant they couldn't use pull down menus. They couldn't use any type of keyboard input or selection routines requiring a cursor/pointer. Since it would be connected to a TV set they couldn't count on the colors being accurate. They couldn't put more than about 10 boxes on the screen at once. They couldn't use fonts smaller than 14 points. And on and on. I thought they were going to lynch us.
So I wrote a lot of stuff about TV interfaces, using TV-legal colors, UI issues, and that sort of thing. Later, Mike and I spent a lot of time working with developers getting the first products going on CDTV. That also brings up Mike's main job (and nightmare), burning discs. Today, burning a CD is trivial - anyone can do it. Back then it was a bit more difficult. We had a Meridian Data Systems machine for burning gold discs. It was the size of a refrigerator and cost about $150,000. Each blank disc cost us about $120 (in bulk). To burn a disk we would physically pull the hard drive with all the data, tweak it a bit, modify the boot code and mount it on a ripped apart and somewhat modified Amiga 2000. The data would be prepped for ISO formatting (inserting all the commands manually) then uploaded to the Meridian (which took about two hours). You programmed the meridian and then you crossed your fingers and waited another two to four hours while it burned the disc. Then you tested it and hoped for the best.
The discs were so expensive and took so long to burn that we never threw them out even if they didn't work. I have a lot of early versions of games and Welcome discs and demo discs that never worked properly but we had a trick that helped out. In a CDTV disc boot, the first thing you do is set the screen and text colors to black so that the typical Amiga boot sequence isn't displayed. You also set the cursor size to one pixel and set the cursor color to black too. We would set the cursor color to gray instead. On a disc that doesn't boot properly the boot sequence eventually crashes and you have to click on a requestor box (that always shows up in the same place on the screen). We put a piece of masking tape stuck on our test machine monitors where the cancel button would be (if you could have seen it). When the machine crashed you would then move the barely visible cursor to the tape and click all around hoping to close the requestor box. You then typed in (blind) the commands to boot off a floppy. The floppy would turn the screen colors and cursor back to normal so you could then see what went wrong and then manually boot the rest of the application. You could then build a floppy boot disk that hopefully would run the application automatically for demos etc.
Mike, Andy, Caroline, and I also used this trick and technique to customize the CDTV boot structure making it much faster and more efficient than an Amiga 500. I can't remember the exact numbers but a 1Mb A500 only gives you something like 750K of usable RAM (the rest is used for OS stuff) but a CDTV, using our boot tricks, can give you something like 840 or 860K of usable RAM. (You could actually use the same tricks on an old Amiga 500 to do the same thing.)
Of course, while exploring this we found out that the OS itself has memory leaks (drove me nuts for days). At an early show my demo discs would run fine for a few hours and then crash. But they crashed in different places. I thought it was my code but it turned out that Amiga DOS was the problem. Almost any application, if you run it long enough, will eventually crash when it runs out of memory and there isn't anything you can do about it because of the way the OS works.
Another OS related problem we encountered was the fact that hard disk directories are stored in RAM - something like 20 bytes per file plus a byte for each letter in the file's name. Not much of a problem for normal computer use but when we started putting thousands and thousands of files on discs the OS would choke. We also had problems getting hard drives that were big enough (or durable enough). We had these $3,000 2GB hard drives and I think I burned out at least four or five of them. (They'd start making this squealing noise and you'd know that it was time to dump your data to another drive fast - hoping the original drive would live long enough to transfer all the files.)
Whew! Guess I got carried away there. Anyway, I should quit now and do something else for a while. I'll write a bit more about all this later. Maybe get into some of the political shenanigans that went on (my battle with a screaming Medi was pretty funny) and perhaps more on the CDTV-CR project headed up by Jeff Porter.
Oh yea, I found a rough draft of the original CDTV-CR user manual that was supposed to have been printed up (mostly just an expanded re-write of the original CDTV printed manual). And the original story-boards for the CDTV-CR Welcome Disc. Not very technical but I might scan them one of these days and send it along. Also, I have a manual titled "Introducing the CDTV/P" - sort of odd. I think it was for the bundled version in the U.S. that would include all the peripherals.
Guy`s Photo Archive