Commodore CDTV
Titles in this collection: 155
Tested with FS-UAE 3.1.68
File count (uncompressed): 710
File size (uncompressed): 48.1 GB
Format: .bin/.cue, .cue/.iso, .mdf/.mds, .iso, .img, and .adf
The Commodore CDTV was a project headed by Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari. It was basically an Amiga 500 computer with a CD-ROM drive in disguise to compete with the rising trend of home multimedia devices. That trend (as well as the CDTV) both died off very quickly.
Unreleased prototypes, games not in English (but only if they were easy enough to play without being fluent in another language), ports from within the life span of the system, public domain collections with games on-disc, plus these extras:
"A Long, Hard Day at the Ranch," "Advanced Military Systems," "All Dogs Go to Heaven," "Almathera Comms & Networking CD," "American Heritage Illustrated Encyclopedic Dictionary: 1991a Edition," "American Vista: The Multimedia U.S. Atlas," "AMOS PD CD: The Official AMOS PD Library on CD," "Animals in Motion: Eadweard Muybridge," "CD Gold Vol. 1," "CD Remix: The CD-DJ - Version II," "CD Remix: The DJ in a Box," "CDPD II," "CDPD III: Amiga Public Domain Collection," "CDTV Demo Discs," "CDTV Genlock Demo," "Cinderella: The Original Fairy Tale," "Commodore A570 Public Domain Kollektion auf CD-ROM," "Dinosaurs for Hire," "Dr. Wellman: A Guide to Good Health for You & Your Family," "Fractal Universe," "Garden Fax: Fruits, Vegetables, & Herbs," "Garden Fax: Indoor Plants," "Garden Fax: Trees, Shrubs, Roses, & Conifers," "Heather Hits Her First Home Run," "Heroic Age of Spaceflight: NASA... The 25th Year," "Insight Dinosaurs," "Insight Technology," "Karaoke Hits 1," "Language TV: English," "Moving Gives Me a Stomach Ache," "Mud Puddle," "Multimedia Toolkit," "Music Maker," "Musicolor," "My Paint: The Paint Program Just for Kids!," "Network," "Network CD," "Pandora's CD," "Read With Astérix: Astérix and Son," "Scary Poems for Rotten Kids," "Sherlock Holmes on a Disc: Illustrated Sherlock Holmes," "The CDPD Public Domain Collection for CDTV," "The CDTV Interactive Point of Sale Compact Disc," "The CDTV Music Disk," "The Connoisseur: Fine Art Collection," "The Grolier Electronic Encyclopedia," "The Guinness CDTV Disc of Records," "The Human Body," "The Illustrated Holy Bible," "The New Basics Electronic Cookbook: 1991a Edition," "The New Grolier Electronic Encyclopedia," "The Night Before Christmas," "The Original CDPD Public Domain Collection," "The Paper Bag Princess," "The Tale of Benjamin Bunny," "The Tale of Peter Rabbit," "Thomas' Snowsuit," "Time Table of History: Business, Politics, & Media - 1991a Edition," "Time Table of History: Science and Innovation - 1991a Edition," "Welcome to CDTV Multimedia," and "Women in Motion: Eadweard Muybridge."
None of these extras are "games" in the typical sense - They contain multimedia programs and Saturn applications that I believe are important to preserve. If you're only after the actual games in this set, feel free to delete those titles named above.
Items removed:
Non-working dumps, duplicates, versions not in English when English was available, European versions of titles when a North American version was available, hacks, and titles not in English that require proficiency in another language to play - Those can be found in my upcoming "CDTV Language Pack."
Release notes:
This is a complete re-work of my previous Commodore CDTV set, which I did a few years back. It was super messy and quite a few new (or at least higher quality) rips have happened since then. I've hand-tested these new additions, added 39 more titles overall, upgraded a couple others to newer revisions, and organized the files much, much cleaner than last time.
The folders in this collection organize the CDs alphabetically, but I also created a "Disks" folder that contains two items: "The CDTV Music Disk," which is a radical, filled-to-the-brim release of '90s scene music, and a "Blank High Density FastFileSystem Disk." That disk will get you started whenever you need to transfer game data to a save disk (or even get some games to load properly) or to copy files from public domain collections to blank media to run later. I suggest keeping one loaded into a virtual drive on your emulator at all times, you'll never know when you need it! I'd just recommend making copies of this original file and keeping the original, untouched one safe for more easy replication.
I suggest using some additional options for maximum compatibility when loading these titles: The highest accuracy settings, delayed CD-ROM insert (at least 3 seconds), and a blank disk (as mentioned above). If you have difficulty starting a game, try the NTSC mode in your emulator.
And now, a rant! The previous archival efforts of this system have been some of the sloppiest messes I've ever seen, most likely due to the commercial failure of the system and a severe lack of popularity. This is certainly no cult classic machine, heh.
There's not even an accurate, comprehensive list of released games that Amiga and Commodore enthusiasts can agree on, and there are a small portion of titles that have just never been ripped before or only exist as copies of copies of copies of CDs. Some software was mistaken as CDTV when they were just CD32-only games and have floated around in collections, unmarked. There was also a ton of Public Domain titles found on various Workbench discs with every last piece of software Amiga heads could find, all crammed into compilations of various compatibility and quality.
Some games on the lists you can find have never even existed, and some others in existing sets have never worked, dragging their corpses all over Archive.org in hopes that maybe someone will re-rip a copy of it some day. And don't even get me started on "Fred Fish..." Haha.
I researched as hard as I could to figure out what to include and from what region each release was from. This time around, I've found more titles that were marketed as CDTV compatible and have included them as well, even if they worked on both CDTV and CD32 systems. Everything here is completely compatible with the CDTV, though.
I am confident that this collection will be the most complete and accurate for gamers in the generations ahead - It's the absolute best I could put together with the sources I had available. Funny enough, when looking for information to update this set, two different sites linked to my previous archive as a trusted source of all known information about CDTV software. So I must be doing -something- right. Hah!
If I didn't list a public domain collection in the "Special items included" section, then it's very obvious how to access the games after booting up the disc. For "The Fred Fish Collection on CD ROM" Volumes 1.2-1.7, you'll want to go to CD_Sampler > Games, then select a game on the left and press "Run Me!" / "RUN IT!!!" to start. For "The Fred Fish Collection On-Line" Volumes 1.4 and 1.5, go to FF_PROGS > GAMES to find your titles.