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What is a Commodore CDTV?
The CDTV was 100% hardware compatiable with the Amiga 500 (Also made by Commodore), It lets you play games in upto 32 colours or watch 1/4 size film's and full sized pictures in 4096 colours, It has stereo sound and could do lots of technical things, Like DMA, Multitask and was very very expandable (Like All Amigas).
The CDTV can be used as a simple CD player but is capable of so much more, Lots of big games where "ported" (Written) for the CDTV, Including Sim City, Lemmings and Team Yankee to name just a few.
The CDTV is a great computer to learn on, It was designed for novice users who only know how to use a TV but as your knolage grows the CDTV becomes a power house, At the heart of the operating system is a library called Intuition, As the name implies it censes the users knolage and adjusts to suit, The average user wont even know there is an operating system running, Playing an audio CD for example is simple, Just put the CD in and the CD player program will load then press play (Either by pushing the play button on the CDTV & Joypad or by selecting the play button using the arrow keys and you can sit back and lisen, Simple.
On the flip side the CDTV can program in C, Java, Amos, E, Assembler and more, HAM images can be created from Jpegs or made by you leaving you with almost true colour images (You wont notice unless you turn off dithering in your paint program or converter), Plug in Midi instruments and record music (And with an optional SCSI interface and CD-Rom burner you can even make the CD with the CDTV).
The CDTV can do anything you want, Who ever you are, What ever you do. The image on the left of this site was done using a CDTV with extra memory (3 Meg total) and thats in 24 Bit colour!!!
Web browsing is even possiable with an OS upgrade (Unless you can find an old program).
Even now, Just over ten years after its launch the CDTV is still used and sells for over £50 for a standard unit. That is a statment to how well it was built and how good they really are.
Out of every title on brand new computers the CDTV can only not do one thing, 3D games, The CDTV can do 3D, It can even texture backgrounds (In upto 4096 colours) but not to modern standards, Wing Commander was the best 3D game for the CDTV but the ships are un-textured, But it does play at 25Fps.