In 1993 Commodore - which was facing serious financial problems - decided to build a console based on the Amiga 1200, called the Amiga CD32.
This system was also equipped with a standard CD-ROM drive, a pioneering addition to the era. In fact, the Amiga CD32 was the first 32-pound gaming machine with a CD-ROM drive in the European market and would be in the world if it hadn't overtaken Fujitsu in a few months with the FM Towns Marty.
The Amiga CD32 was based on the Amiga 1200 hardware, which means it was powered by Motorola's 32-bit MC68EC020 processor and AGA (Advanced Graphics Architecture) chipset. This meant that it could pick up resolutions of up to 1,280 × 512 pixels in the PAL system, or 1,280 × 400 in the NTSC. The palette was 24 bytes, or 16.8 million colors. Of these, up to 256 colors could be displayed simultaneously in the games. Commodore's gaming machine has received a large number of peripherals such as keyboard, external FDD and hard drive, mouse, MPEG decoding unit (for Video CD). In practice, then, it could be converted to a regular Amiga 1200 with a CD-ROM drive.
With this enhanced regional repertoire and with the weapon compatibility with Amiga games, the console entered the European market with demands in Christmas 1993. In the first weeks its commercial course was more than satisfactory, even managing especially in the British market to surpass on sale the Sega Mega-CD (s.s. CD-ROM unit for Mega Drive). However, this dynamic did not last long. Commodore, which was already in a very bad financial situation, went bankrupt in April of 1994.
