What! Surely not another CD-ROM
drive for the A1200 and A600?
Richard Baguley investigates.
The CD-ROM drive itself is a basically a bog-standard double-speed SCSI mechanism manufactured by Sanyo, encased in a pretty tough-looking metal case. At the rear of the unit are the two SCSI ports, so you can connect other units to form a SCSI chain.
Because many CD32 titles use CD audio as well as Amiga-generated audio, you need to be able to mix both sets of sounds. The CD32 has circuitry built in to do this, but the Power unit does it by routing the Amiga's sound through the CD-ROM unit and mixing it with the CD audio at the same time. It means you have quite a few cables floating around and cluttering up the place, but it does work.
Because of the way the system operates, you can't boot up off a SCSI unit attached to it. Instead, you can either boot up from your internal hard disk or create a special floppy which transfers control over to the hard disk and sets the rest of the boot process going. This isn't a real problem - if you want to use the CD-ROM drive you are going to need a hard disk anyway.
One of the main selling points of a unit like this is that it can emulate a CD32, so you can use it to play all those lovely CD32 games while still maintaining the flexibility of the A1200.
Because it's not possible to boot up directly from any device on the SCSI bus, the installation program can be used to create a special bootable floppy which sets up the system and hands control over to the CD-ROM drive.
Some clever programming and other jiggery pokery is used to emulate the special chips which are present in the CD32 but not in the A1200. This system works fairly well, but it did fall down on a number of CD32 titles, such as The Chaos Engine and Beneath A Steel Sky.
Some CD32 games use very weird tricks to get the most out of the machine, and it is unlikely that these will work. Power Computing are aware of problems with some games, and the emulation has provision for configuration files which allow specific games to work.
A few of these are included with the unit and HiSoft are continually working on improving compatibility. If you want to check about a specific game, you should give Power Computing a ring on the number below because new fixes are being created all the time. It's worth pointing out that the Squirrel already works with many discs that the Zappo CD drive has problems with.
Some other games (such as Tower Assault and Microcosm) worked, but the fancy graphic intros had a few problems, with some jumps in the Microcosm and slightly corrupted sound in Tower Assault. Otherwise, the games played fine.
Apart from these few problems, the emulation seemed pretty good. All of the games which worked on the Power CD seemed to play just as well as they do on a CD32, although you don't have all of the controller buttons (unless you beg, borrow or steal a CD32 controller).
DISTRIBUTOR Power Computing 01234 273000 PRICE £199.95 SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS A1200 or A600 SPEED *** There are faster CD-ROM drives but this is certainly no slouch. MANUAL *** Reasonably good, although some details are misssing. ACCESSIBILITY **** All very easy to set up, no fiddling really necessary. FEATURES **** An extremely good combination of SCSI interface and CD-ROM drive that should be a popular choice. VALUE **** The Power package is particularly good value when you consider you are getting both a CD-ROM drive and a SCSI interface.
