Subject: REVIEW: Almathera Demo Collection 2 CD-ROM
From: [email-masked] (Thomas Baetzler)
Date: 12 Nov 1993 05:39:45 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews

PRODUCT NAME

	Almathera Demo Collection 2 CD-ROM

BRIEF DESCRIPTION

	A CD-ROM disc for all Amiga systems containing lots of demos,
soundtracker modules, pictures, IFF 8SVX samples and freely distributable
games.

AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION

	Name:		Almathera System Ltd.
	Address:	Challenge House
			618 Mitcham Road
			Croydon
			CR9 3AU
			U.K.

	Telephone:	++44 (0)81 683 6418 (valid until end of October 1993)
	FAX:		++44 (0)81 689 8927 (valid until end of October 1993)

	E-mail:		[email-masked] 	(Distribution)
			[email-masked]	(technical inquiries)

LIST PRICE

	List price in Germany is DM 59.-. I do not have information on
English/American pricing.

SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS

	HARDWARE

		A CD-ROM drive is required.

		Almathera Systems claim that this disc is compatible with
		the CDTV and CD^32. I have not been able to verify this.

	SOFTWARE

		A CD-ROM filesystem is required.

	An overview of Amiga CD-ROM drives and filesystems is available
	in the comp.sys.amiga.reviews archives.

	Since this disc is a compilation of programs from widely varying
	sources, not every program will work on every Amiga system.  Some
	programs might require special hardware like extra memory and/or an
	accelerated CPU.

	Most of the demos included on this disc will probably fail on "fancy"
	Amiga systems (e.g., anything else but a plain A500 with 1 MB of
	chip memory and a single disk drive).  For best results you should
	boot up in ECS/PAL mode with caches and VBR turned off.  The more
	Chip RAM is left free, the higher the chances for success are.
	Since most of those demos take over the Amiga completely, it would
	be wise to save all work in progress to avoid data loss.

	Almathera Systems supplies a basic set of viewing and listening tools
	for the animations, pictures and modules on the CD-ROM.

COPY PROTECTION

	None.

MACHINE USED FOR TESTING

	My test setup includes:

	o	Amiga 2000, ECS chipset, Kickstart 2.04, Workbench 2.1.
	o	Commodore A2630 68030 accelerator with 4 MB of 32-bit RAM.
	o	GVP Series II SCSI host adapter with 2 MB RAM installed.
	o	Toshiba XM 3401 CD-ROM drive.
	o	Picasso II graphics card.
	
	I have tested this disc using the AsimCDFS 1.1c, Xetec 1.651, Z3 CDFS
2.9, and AmiCDROM 1.2a filing systems.

INSTALLATION

	On the CDTV and CD^32, you just boot off the CD, and you're ready to
go.  On all other systems, you'll have to add some Assigns by hand or copy
needed files over to your SYS: partition.  Personally, I use the following
script file to set up all necessary assigns:

	Assign c: demo2:c sys:c
	Assign devs: demo2:devs ADD
	Assign libs: demo2:libs ADD

REVIEW

	I'd guess most users like to show off the capabilities of their Amiga
by playing demos, animations or some soundtracker music.  Even the most
hardboiled power users have some Megademos stashed away out of sight, just
in case....

	Acquiring a large collection of this kind of toy stuff is usually a
pain in the ass, since it involves downloading many megabytes of data, which
can be rather expensive - and then you find out you wasted all the time and
effort for a complete dud.

	Almathera Software realized quite early that there was a demand to get
large masses of eye and ear candy on CD-ROM, and consequently produced their
Demo Collection.  Now, about a year later, there's the Demo Collection II:
newer, bigger, better?

	The CD's packed to capacity:  games, animations, graphics, clip art,
modules, and even fonts.  Everything is well organized in drawers, and
ready-to-use software and data is tagged with the appropriate icons.

	Besides the fun stuff, there are also complete installations of WB
1.3, 2.0 and 3.0, as well as a preconfigured Parnet. (Parnet is a networking
solution for the parallel port, which makes it possible to use a CDTV as a
remote CD-ROM player. Having a preconfigured Parnet around enables those
people to boot their CDTV directly off the CD-ROM.)

	Demos, animations and modules can be played directly from disk.
Depending on your machine and setup, the results are more or less
satisfactory.  With my A2000, I can play at least a selection of demos
directly from the CD without crashing it.  The supplied Megademos are all
crunched using DMS, so they have to be unpacked to disk first.  CD^32 owners
will miss out here, but then most of the demos won't run on their machine
anyway.

	The second volume of the Demo Collection contains over 2000 modules,
organized by name in 26 subdirectories.  Depending on your taste in music,
you'll either love or hate them, since most of the stuff included is of
typical techno/demo quality.  For me, it was a quite taxing task to pick out
the gems.

	For music creators, there's a large (read: 6000+) selection of
ready-to-use IFF 8SVX samples of musical instruments.  The quality is quite
mixed: some samples are brilliant, while others are just crap, with most
samples being about average.  One gripe I have with the selection is that
there's not nearly enough special effects in there for my taste.  But then
I'm not into music, but looking for a nice beep sound.

	The animations are quite fair, I'd say.  For example, there are some
nice VistaPro flights through a canyon, which should come out just great on a
CD^32.  Still, once you've seen them a few times, they tend to lose their
fascination.  Most animations play just fine on my machine, except those
using the supplied viewer "ashow" (see the BUGS section, below).

	Another large section of the CD is devoted to digitized images in
various resolutions.  Viewing them left me wondering whose holiday snaps were
used for scanning them.  This is clearly the weakest part of the collection,
as far as I am concerned.

	And then there are games - lots of them.  However, you'll be hard
pressed to find anything new in there:  it's basically all the stuff that's
available elsewhere, too.  If you don't already own a large collection of
freely distributable games, you might like this.

DOCUMENTATION

	The cover booklet of the CD-ROM gives some instructions as how to
access the data on the CD-ROM on different Amiga systems.  Besides that, the
only documentation regarding material on the CDs are those "readme" files
that were included in some of the original archives.  Especially, I miss some
kind of annotated index for the modules and sound files on the Demo CD 2.

LIKES AND DISLIKES

	I love to have all the fun stuff bundled on a single CD-ROM.  Still,
I'm missing some sort of quality control on behalf of the publisher.  The
whole collection looks just like it was put together the way it is to fill a
CD-ROM.  It's definitely not a collection of the best there is.

	Maybe the situation would improve if Almathera gave away free copies
of forthcoming Demo collections to the contributors, like other companies do.
This would surely motivate people to contribute on one hand, and disarm the
"exploitation" debate on the other.

COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS

	I can't help but compare the second volume of the Demo Collection to
the first, since they are similar in layout and purpose.  I could notice at
least some improvements over the original:

	- They didn't recrunch the demos with some stupid packer.  Now at
	least some of them run without crashing my machine.  (I couldn't run
	a single demo from the Demo Collection I, since they tended to
	decrunch in my Workbench's bitmap....)

	- Megademos are now archived using DMS.  This means unpacking them
	works a little bit more reliable than with their proprietary packer.

	- Overall, the organisation is a bit nicer.

BUGS

	I am unable to get the supplied animation viewer "ashow" to work.  It
just reads data off the CD, but never displays anything.  Switching back
from an 800x600x8 color WB to the basic PAL 640x256x4 color WB doesn't
help.  I have even tried booting without a startup-sequence - all to no
avail.  Sadly, there is no documentation supplied with the viewer, so I
don't know whom to contact in that matter. A cheap solution is to use the
supplied copy of Thomas Krehbiel's VT (ViewTek) to view those anims.

VENDOR SUPPORT

	I have sent in registration cards for other Almathera CD-ROMs I own,
but as of today, I haven't received any kind of update information or even a
catalogue of available titles.

WARRANTY

	Almathera Systems offer no special warranty.

CONCLUSIONS

	All in all, I have mixed feelings about the second volume of the Demo
Collection. The basic idea behind it is surely brilliant, but not too
convincing in implementation. Maybe I just hoped for just too much when I
started to review this disc, maybe I'm just spoiled. I would rate the Demo
Collection II 3 out of 5 shiny CD's.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

	Copyright 1993 Thomas Baetzler.  All rights reserved.

You can contact me at:
	
	[email-masked]		(fast, will be forwarded to me)
	[email-masked]	(slow, but stable and reliable)
	Medic BSS, 2:2476/454.2@fidonet (fido, neither fast nor reliable)

	Thomas Baetzler, Herrenstr. 62, 76133 Karlsruhe, FRG
	Voice: ++49 (0)721 29872  Medic BBS: ++49 (0)721 496821

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