This research is based entirely on a survey undertaken by Amiga Format in October 1990. Some seven months before the Amiga CDTV was released and 17 months before the A690 Is due to become available. Of people who responded to the survey. 98 per cent were interested in upgrading to CDTV specification, and 48 per cent said they would be w illing to pay £300 or more to do so. If. As Commodore estimate, there arc around a million Amiga users in the UK. This would mean a potential base of 480.000 CD users. Getting a wide, iastalled base of CD users is crucial to the future of CD as a medium for Amiga software. With so much data involved in the development of a 500-Megabyte CD title, a good one is going to be very, very expensive to produce. We can only expect to sec really impressive titles when software houses know they can make the development money back in sales, so let's hope Amiga CD takes off. In the short term, however, whether Amiga users will want to buy a CD drive will depend on the quality of the 'first generation' of CD titles. Which is why Amiga Format assesses the first 45 titles to become available as our main feature for this month. Just a couple of outstanding titles could be enough to make buying a CD title worthwhile. The brave new world of CD software starts on Page 23. MARCH 1991 Commodore UK has promised that the Amiga CD- ROM drive is almost here. Their spokesman Andrew Ball told Amiga Format We re working to introduce it in March and we're hoping to hit a price-point of under £300. We are really looking forward to it". The unit, known as the A690. Will plug onto the side of an Amiga 500 enabling the Amiga to load and run CDTV discs. It will come with a separate power supply and a 'caddv' into which a CD must be slotted before you put it in the drive. It features an on off volume switch and headphone socket on the front, with stereo audio-in and audio-out sockets on the back.