So 25 years after retiring my CD32 to my parents attic I have caught the retro buzz.
I had purchased the CD32 in the early / mid 90’s, saving my wages from part time job in a wild plant nursery outside Kirkcudbright in rural South West Scotland whilst in the last couple of years at school. It was a toss up between the A1200 and the CD32 and I bought the CD32 on the basis I would be able to upgrade it to a full computer later. I purchased an A4000 keyboard which fitted the keyboard connector on the CD32 and used my existing Amiga mouse which obviously resulted in a bit of a colour mismatch with the Amiga beige vs the CD32 grey but they worked. Later I purchased the bulky and tetchy Paravision SX1 expansion which effectively turned the CD32 into an A1200 – adding RGB video, serial, parallel, floppy disk ports, a PC AT keyboard port and an internal IDE connector for a hard drive. The unit also facilitated memory expansion and could work in conjunction with the official Commodore FMV video module. Unfortuantley the unit was external, rather ugly and had the habit of blowing up my CD32 for the simple fact it wasn’t secured to the CD32 in any manner other than slotted in and so the slightest knock would cause it to short. This resulted in the whole lot going to the attic before I moved to Northern Ireland in 1999 to look after my Grandmother in County Tyrone.
Several years later my parents decided to sell up and move to Northern Ireland and as such there was a clear out. My collection of Amiga magazines went to the bin and so did the troublesome SX1 (now worth quite a bit of money). The CD32 and my fathers A600 made the move however, ending up in a new attic.
Then in 2023, married, with kids I got into the retro scene and ended up pulling the old Amiga hardware out of my parents attic. Both the CD32 and A600 were stripped and the motherboards sent to be recapped. Once reassembled, the CD32 was put to good use with the kids enjoying games of Banshee.
Later, I came across the TF set of accelerator cards for the Amiga and discovered that there was a TF330 that fits internally to the CD32 providing and extra 64mb RAM and a 68030 CPU upgrade as well as an IDE connector which these days mean installing a CF or SD card adaptor.
