November 2008 Archives

Captain's Log / star date 2008.1130

By cf on November 30, 2008 9:05 AM | Permalink

I've spent quite some time the last couple of days playing games on my CDTV the way they should be played: with regular joysticks. The CDTV trackball is a wonderful device that adds functionality to the CDTV it should have had as standard, one of those being standard joystick ports, which Commodore didn't include on the main unit itself. I've expanded my CDTV with a genlock device which adds S-Video outputs. I've hooked up the CDTV to my HDTV using an S-Video lead and the picture quality is really excellent! I was worried the Amiga's graphics would look awful on such a high-res capable screen, but it looks great and the colours simply shine. Been playing lots of Pang and Jaguar XJ-220 and I'm currently looking into burning Secret of Monkey Island on CD to create a bootable CDTV title out of it. All harddrive installable games should be doable I suppose. Here's a couple of new photos of my CDTV.

Next week should be interesting, as I will be picking up a boxed (!) CDTV including boxed keyboard and diskdrive. CDTV's are pretty rare, so finding a boxed one is great! And yep, this haul includes a trackball controller! The new CDTV is not the only boxed CD-based Amiga I'll be adding to my collection, as I'm expecting some more stuff next week. Stay tuned ;-)

I also picked up a stack of Amiga Format mags and coverdisks from a local Amiga/C64 fan and came back a week later to pick up a remaining stack of CU Amiga's and coverdisks for a bargain. Lots of duplicate coverdisks in my collection now, but you can never have too many of those ;-)

Captain's Log / star date 2008.1121

By cf on November 21, 2008 6:43 PM | Permalink

Today I received an item in the mail that I was awaiting anxiously for some days: The CDTV Trackball remote controller (CD1200). I have a CDTV in my collection and it's one of the coolest Amigas ever made in my opinion. Several peripherals were made for it and the Trackball controller is one of the rarest and coolest. Apparently, due to its relatively high price tag back in the day, not many were sold, so they are hard to come by and usually go for hefty prices. They're usually just as expensive as a working CDTV!

It's an infrared remote controller that functions as a trackball and as such a much better way to operate mouse driven apps or games than the standard remote control pad. The trackball is in the middle and the 2 mouse buttons are located on the upper right. To the left are buttons that allow you to operate the CDTV in the same way as the buttons on the regular remote. But that's not all! The killer feature IMHO is the fact that it also has 2 standard joystick/mouse connectors which allow you to connect standard Commodore mice and joysticks. For some unfathomable reason Commodore deviated from the standard connectors on the CDTV unit itself so that it is impossible to connect a regular Commodore joystick or mouse to the CDTV. The CD1200 trackball controller fixes this problem and allows for semi-wireless joystick and mouse control of your CDTV! Just put the controller in line of sight on your table. Connect 2 joysticks and play a 2-player round of Lotus Turbo Challenge without worrying about the length of your joystick cables. I'll be hooking up my CDTV this weekend again and trying it out. Good times. :-)

Tomorrow I'm picking up a big stack of Amiga Format magazines including coverdisks from the same friendly neighbourhood Amiga fan that I got the last batch of CU Amiga mags from. He's giving me a bargain deal on them so I simply could not resist. Have a good weekend!

Captain's Log / star date 2008.1117

By cf on November 17, 2008 3:43 PM | Permalink

Today I uploaded some photographs of my Amiga CD32. I'm currently experimenting a little with the lighting. Let me know what you think. You can find them in the Collection Menu or by clicking here. I also managed to score a load of CU Amiga coverdisks between numbers 170 and 190, which I'm pretty content about, because those coverdisks are from the 1997/1998 era, which were the last two years that CU Amiga was in publication and as such are hard to find. From 1996 onwards CU Amiga was available in both coverdisk and cover CD-ROM format. Towards the end of CU Amiga's run it is increasingly hard to find the actual coverdisks, because the CD-ROM format was becoming more prevalent. There were 193 CU Amiga coverdisks in total and I'm only missing 11 coverdisks in my collection, which are all from the 1997/1998 era. If you happen to have any disks from that era and want to sell or trade them, do get in touch with me by clicking on the Contact link. I have lots of CU Amiga coverdisks for trade as well.

More Amiga goodies should be arriving this week. Stay tuned! ;-)

Captain's Log / star date 2008.1112

By cf on November 12, 2008 8:01 PM | Permalink

Well, I know it's nothing more than gloating, but I just couldn't resist. I recently acquired a second Viper 520, one of the best accelerators for the A500, IMHO. Today I pulled the other Viper 520 from my Amiga and put them both next to each other and took a couple of snapshots. Yes, it should be illegal for one man to own 2 Viper 520's and 1 Viper 530. ;-)

Interestingly enough they are not both 100% identical. The first one has sockets for the 2 Kickstart ROMs, the second one has the Kickstart ROMs surface mounted. Strange... Ah well, time to do another bout of Pinball Dreams!

Captain's Log / star date 2008.1110

By cf on November 10, 2008 7:07 PM | Permalink

Been a while since the last posting, but that doesn't mean things have been quiet. I added several goodies to my collection over the past few weeks. First up I expanded my CU Amiga collection recently with the addition of some harder to find issues from 1990 and 1991. A visitor of this site was selling his Amiga magazine collection and contacted me to ask if I would be interested in buying some of his issues. I managed to fill a good few holes in my collection and the funny thing is, it turns out the guy happens to live very close to where I live. It was a 5 minute drive to pick up the magazines! It's a small world after all! ;-)

Besides adding those CU Amiga issues I bought several CU Amiga cover disks to go along with the mags (I collect the original cover disks as well). Before it was called CU Amiga, the magazine went under the name of Commodore User (hence the abbreviation C.U.) and covered the C64 and other 8-bit Commodore machines. In those days some issues of CU came with cover cassettes. I added a few original Commodore User cover cassettes to my collection. I don't really actively collect them (not yet anyway), but they're a nice addition to my CU collection and I got them fairly cheap.

My collection of A500 accelerators recently also grew with the addition of another Viper 520. I have a Viper 520 installed in one of my A500's and it's a great turbo card. A couple of weeks ago the opportunity to buy a second Viper 520 for a good price presented itself, so I did.

Also updated today is the SNES Games gallery with a few new games and a new entry for the SNES Fire FX Converter which allows for playing NTSC games on a PAL SNES machine.

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