Commodore International Ltd this week formally launches its CDTV player, which combines a stripped down Amiga processor with a compact disk player to create an interactive multimedia system combining audio, video, graphics and text: it will be available in the US from April 19 in Los Angeles, San Jose, San Francisco, Sacramento and Chicago, followed by New York, Boston, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Dallas and Denver in May; to keep the cost down, the player connects to a television set and home audio system operated by a hand-held infra- red remote control device; during the first phase, 50 multimedia titles will be available, with more than a hundred planned, among them The New Grolier Electronic Encyclopaedia, the World Vista Atlas, the The Guinness CDTV Disc of Record, interactive versions of Cinderella, Snoopy: The Case of the Missing Blanket and The Tale of Peter Rabbit; it also plays conventional compact discs at eight-times oversampling and plays the record industry’s new formats, CD+Graphics and CD+MIDI; it sells for $1,000.
