INTERPLAY CD PLAYER
© 1994-2021 SilverHawk Software
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The Story Behind The Success
Every now and then, you come up with a brilliant idea. An idea which originates from frustration because no one else has solved the problem. In our case, it all started when we received a CDRom. You’ve got to remember, this was back in 1994 and the first 1x and 2x CDRom drives were emerging for the Amiga. We had one of the French made 2x CDRom drives from a company called Archos. This was a PCMCIA-connected CDRom solution which had an external case and a proprietary pcmcia-adapter going from the IDE connector of the Mitsumi-drive and connected into the PCMCIA connector of the A1200.
(Picture: The Archos PCMCIA Overdrive CDRom for Amiga 1200)
The CDRom worked quite well. It mounted discs as CD0: under Workbench and everything worked well. It even let you play CD32 games by doing some scripting and mounting tricks. I remember we bought one CD32 game with this CDRom, and that was the game Banshee – a shoot ‘em up game. It was more or less just the A1200 game with some added Audio tracks on the CD.
The CDRom was a nice addition to the A1200 setup, but it lacked one very important piece of software: A good audio cd player. The audio cd-player provided with the CDRom opened up in full screen and looked like it was made to mimic the one which CD32 had: Colorful and fullscreen.
(Picture: Specifications of the Overdrive CD Rom Drive)
We were always a bit annoyed that we had to use a full-screen player in order to listen to audio cd’s back then, and started looking for a better piece of software which would play audio CD’s on the workbench screen instead. What we actually found out in ’95 was that there wasn’t a player which worked for the Overdrive CDRom. Remember that back then, most CDRoms for the Amiga was using the scsi-interface and thus most CDPlayer software was targeting the scsi.device to control it. In our case with the Overdrive CDRom drive, it was using the Commodore cd.device.
So – we had to make our own software. Stian Olsen was already then a great C programmer on the Amiga and was using Lattice C as his main development suite so he was doing the programming part. Espen Skog did the GUI design and development part. Together we combined our knowledge and enthusiasm and started on what was going to be the first version of “CD Player”. This first version was more like a proof of concept. We used the cd.device and tested its functions to see if they corresponded with the set of features which we added to the GUI for our program. It worked very well. We had a fully working version and released this to the public via Aminet on the 27thof February 1995.
Internal versions of the player took shape and we had a V2 and V3 done during 1995 and added more and more useful functions.
(Picture: Interplay 2.1 – with programming mode added)
We decided to do a name change after the first release of CDPlayer1.0 and came up with a more suitable name for our bellowed CDPlayer and named it: Interplay. Interplay versions 2 and 3 are not currently available on Aminet but we will see if we can dig them out and upload them from our BBS which should hold all versions ever released (www.silverhawk.no) . SilverHawk BBS (still running at telnet nodes on bbs.silverhawk.no on port 6400) is the Support BBS for Interplay.
Now, some of you might say “Hey – you ripped off the name from the makers of Doom”. Please keep in mind, we were pure Amiga enthusiasts. We did not own PC’s or play games on them. So the name Interplay was actually something we came up with without knowing about that PC Software House. The name suited the product and we were happy to now have named our baby. It was now time to really take Interplay to the next level. So we added something which did not exist on any Amiga CD players back then: An algorithm which gave each inserted CD a unique checksum and stored this in the Interplay Database. The user could then open the TrackName Editor and label each audio track and the name of the CD and the band. The next time the user inserted the CD, it would recognize it and would be presented with a playlist with the name of the tracks instead of the somewhat boring “Track 01, Track 02….etc” type of presentation.
So, we now had a proper CD Player for the market and we were targeting those with IDE CDRom drives (like the Archos Overdrive) in general. Of course, we did not exclude the owners of SCSI CDRom drives, but we were glad to have a very juicy CD Player for the growing IDE Interfaced CDRom drives which had started to emerge.
The market started to pick up on Interplay and it did not take long before we saw people supporting us, emailing us with tips and bugs to solve. One guy (Steven Ross) actually made a complete editor which loaded the Interplay Database and enabled you to edit your complete library of registered CD’s.
(Picture: CD List Editor by Steven Ross)
His software was called InterplayCDEditor and was launched on Aminet November 1995 and you can find the link for it in the resource section below. A big thank-you to Steve for making the great editor.
(Picture: CD List Editor – Editing entries made easy)
Amiga Shopper included our version of Interplay (4.0beta) on their cover disk in the February 1996 edition. And handed us a quite nice review.
(Picture: Amiga Shopper Feb ’96: Reviewing Interplay)
Another contributor was Gregor Rosenauer who gave Interplay a pretty NewIcon as we had not included a NewIcon with our product. Thanks, Gregor. His Icon can be downloaded from Aminet and the link is in the resource section below as well.
While Interplay was getting more and more users worldwide, the product also got excellent reviews in different Amiga magazines and was spread on cover disks as part of their PD section.
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| (Picture: Nice feedback from a user of Interplay in Amiga Shopper March 1996 edition) | (Picture: Excellent review from Amiga Shopper February 1996) |
Since we did not charge any money for Interplay, the software was bundled with a lot of Amiga magazines back in the mid 90’s. We had no idea that Interplay was being bundled until free magazines started to appear in our mail boxes.
During 1996 we had Interplay in sort of a Final version 4, but released a 4.1 version which included some minor fixes. Since Interplay now worked very well with IDE based CDRoms on the Amiga (plus the SCSI drives we tested via our supporters) we figured we should freeze the software and let it rest for a while. We had no more ideas how to improve it and we were actually very happy with its performance. But, “Feature Creep” came lurking and we revisited the idea of making a new type of GUI for it. Many Module players started to have these nice graphic GUI’s and we began planning a Version 5 of Interplay and even a Gold-edition. The Gold edition would have a GUI with a gold-coloured theme. So Deluxe Paint was used to draw buttons and to add a colorful theme to Interplay.
(Picture: Interplay v5 About Screen)
Sadly, we did not finish this and we published a note on Aminet http://aminet.net/disk/cdrom/Interplay5inf.lha where we informed the users that V5 would not be released. We were so busy running our BBS and this was also a busy time with school and work so neither the Gold of the regular Version 5 of Interplay was released.
(Picture: Interplay 5 Gold template buttons)
During 1995 and 1996 we were informed from our various users that Interplay worked very well with many different setups and models of CDRoms. So we started to add a list of CDRoms and cd-controlers which reportedly worked well with Interplay, and we put this information in with the documentation so that the user would be able to see if his setup was supported.
Here is the list of what we gathered back then. As you can see, it support so much more than just the Archos Overdrive:
| Interplay should work fine with the following setups:
* Archos’ Overdrive Interplay is reported to be working on these setups: * Archos’ Overdrive |
During the months of the Interplay era, we received lots of great reviews from various Amiga magazines. We received great feedback from the users around the world and we were sent magazines which had reviewed and incorporated Interplay on their Cover Disks. Two Norwegian guys in their early 20’s, just doing what started as a fun idea, and we started to receive incredible reviews like these:
| Amiga Computing – Sept 1995:
“This is one of the best CD players for the Amiga” Amiga Shopper – Dec 1995: “Interplay 3.1 is an excellent audio CD player…” Amiga Shopper – Feb 1996: “Rolls Royce’s of CD Players” |
That was the long story behind Interplay. Thanks for reading.
RESOURCES:
| Name | Launch Date | Link |
| CD Player V1.0 | 1995-02-27 | http://aminet.net/disk/cdrom/CDPlayer10.lha |
| InterplayEditor V1.08 | 1995-11-01 | http://aminet.net/disk/cdrom/IPlayEd108.lha |
| Interplay V4.1 | 1996-02-18 | http://aminet.net/disk/cdrom/Interplay41.lha |
| Interplay NewIcon | 1996-02-13 | http://aminet.net/pix/nicon/2newicons.lha |
| Interplay5-info | 1997-07-29 | http://aminet.net/disk/cdrom/Interplay5inf.lha |
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