CD32: Amiga in the Arcades

The CD32 was Commodore’s attempt at creating a console that could compete with products from Nintendo and Sega. Sadly it wasn’t the success it could have been. What many people do not know is that the CD32 was the basis of an arcade machine. Yes, it’s actually true, the CD32 was being played at arcades! The machine was called Cubo CD32.

Today we’ll take a look at the specifications of the Cubo and find out where it was used.

The Cubo was based around the CD32 console. According to the Big Book of Amiga Hardware, it was apparently designed and developed by an Italian company known as CD Express. They also inform us about the following:

(…) contains additional expansion boards which are used to interface with the controls of the arcade unit. The arcade unit configures itself by the means of the keyboard port and the coin mechanism is translated into the control pads left and right keys.

As for the date of release of the Cubo, Ninjaw once stated at his CD32 site that the machine was first released in 1994.

This means that it is truly an Amiga CD32 in an arcade cabinet. With the wide range of games available for this console, it should have been a big hit under the right circumstances.

A question, however, is what kind of games they used on this machine? Did they use ordinary CD32 games for it or specially designed titles?

It seems like only tailor-made games was used in the Cubo. I did a little research on the Internet, and I found some information concerning the software for the Cubo.

Here’s a few of the games:

Candy Puzzle:

– I’ve seen a few screenshots of this game and it looks very interesting. It seems like a clone of Bust-a-Move. The graphics are well made, but sadly I can’t say anything about how the game actually plays.

Harem Challenge:

– As you can read from the title, Harem Challenge is aimed at adults. It is a puzzle-game as far as I can see.

Lazer Quiz:

– This is supposed to be an ordinary quiz game. Can’t find much information on it.

Lazer Quiz 2:

– Again, an ordinary quiz game. Seems to include quite a few high-resolution images.

Sadly I haven’t had the opportunity to play these games on the real thing. From the screenshots I’ve seen, I think the games look professional.

In this short entry, we’ve been looking at the phenomenon known as Cubo. There’s not much information to obtain on the subject, but that might change. The interest for this machine seems to be spreading among the people of the Amiga community.