<> CD WARS CHEAP AND FREE CD-ROM'S By Steve Bye Now that the Amiga CD software market has had a little time to mature there are quite a few out-of-date CD's that can be bought cheaply. There are many special offers about, including freebies, if you are willing to look hard enough. In case you hadn't already noticed there is a CD war going on amongst the Amiga PD libraries. There has been many a harsh word spoken between libraries who are undercutting each other. Some libraries have reportedly sold CD's at cost, or less, just to attract new customers, in retail this is known as loss leading i.e. One sells a popular product at a loss to attract customers who hopefully buy other 'normal' priced products off you as well, very common in the Supermarkets, just take a look at some bargains like a tin of beans at Normans Supermarket for 9p, the tin/label/beans/distribution must cost that? There have been many special CD offers recently, like two free CD's when purchasing the UPD Quad CD set from Weird Science (while stocks lasted), which I must confess, I took advantage of the deal and I was very happy when I received nearly 6 Giga bytes of PD for just over £30. Weird Science are one's to keep an eye on as they also offered Aminet Set 1 and UPD for £39.99 the pair, that's eight CD's costing around a fiver a CD. When you consider the contents of all the CD's are archived you are really getting nearer the contents of 14 CD's. That works out at £2.85 a CD, Wow! That's what I call a bargain. More recently WS offered a FREE copy of the Assassins CD with ANY CD purchase. Another company recently offered a "free" CD to anyone that sent in £6 to cover post and packing. I didn't apply for that "bargain" on the basis that I couldn't think of a jiffy bag that could cost over a fiver! Most of the larger CD suppliers have huge stocks of unsold CD's that they need to get shot of. Most offer some really good CD bundles. For example, you can get five CD's for £25 from P.D Soft which includes Fresh Fish 7, Ultimedia 1 & 2, Giga PD and Amok 2. They are all old and naff, but surely worth it if you are interested in at least three of them? There are plenty of golden oldies at £6.99 to £8.99 from the First Computer Centre. Bargains like BCI Net, CD-PD, Demo CD, Gateway and Illusions could all have their uses. If you have £65 to spare and need all the latest PD, Epic Marketing offer quite an original deal. You must first buy their CD, entitled "The Epic Collection" for a staggering £59.95. This CD contains their "most popular floppy titles" and as a registered user you can then get the CD updated every two months with all the latest releases. The drawback is each update will cost you another £9.99. If you spend a lot of money each month buying the latest P.D floppies this deal may save you some money? Epic also do a "Lucky Dip" CD for a bargain £4.99 which may be worth investigating. Another unusual CD deal I recently took advantage of was from a hardware company that offered two free CD's in return for the connecting lead of your old Amiga power supply. Apparently the square power connectors are virtually impossible to come by now days and this company needed them to construct their product with. The two freebies were nothing special, but hey, I had an old burnt out A500 power pack that should of been binned anyway. There are plenty of bargains and deals advertised in the Amiga press, so keep your eyes peeled. If you intend to buy a CD look out for a library that offers a "Price matching" service. This means they will try to sell you the CD you want at the lowest price you can find advertised elsewhere. This is so you can still shop at your regular friendly PD outlet and get the best price possible. Probably the most obvious CD bargain doing the rounds recently is the "Ten On Ten" pack from Almathera. For £39.95 you get a right mixed bunch of 10 CD's including CDPD 1&2, Images, Clipart, Fonts, World Vista, Works of Shakespeare, Pandoras CD, and a good game in its day called Team Yankee. It's all down to taste if this pack represents a bargain. I must confess it's not my cup of tea. If you are really desperate for a few quid off your Aminet CD purchases you can "Subscribe" with most major CD suppliers and get Aminet at £2 off per CD. You also get it sent to you on its day of release. BUT did you know you can get a FREE COPY of the Aminet CD if you are an author of one of the programs on the CD? You didn't? Well take a look at the readme doc on any recent Aminet CD to find out. I will report back on what happens when I go for my freebie soon as poss. A good lesson here on why you should always read readme file ;-) If your interests lay more in the graphics/fonts/samples/clipart and text areas then the really hot bargains are to be had away from home. Pop into W.H Smiths and browse through the P.C mags. Most of them have free CD's on the cover and the majority have lots of graphics and fonts on them. Quite a few of the P.C mags are only a couple of quid so we are really into bargain territory here. Watch it though some of the better P.C mags cost around £5. One of my P.C CD's holds a few meg of clipart, about 100 classic books in ASCII and lot's of fonts. Easily worth £2.25 I thought. Another recent bargain got me two CD's on the cover for £2.95. Of course you also get the magazine too and this sometimes leads to even more freebies. Quite often the bigger P.C companies offer you a free sampler CD, all you have to do is fill in the coupon. I sent off for one and it arrived about 3 months later. It only had a few good pictures on it and some fonts, but there you go, you don't pay your money and you takes your chances. Anyway the PC mags make good bog-reading and for those urgent times when the bog roll runs out :-) There is no problem accessing the data on P.C CD-Rom's. Your CD-drive will be able to read a P.C CD as if it were an ordinary Amiga CD, so there is no need for CrossDos or similar. Obviously you won't be able to boot a P.C CD or run any of the programs on it without an emulator. But what do want do you want for a couple of quid? Back to bargain hunting on the Amiga. The quad CD, looks set to become a common occurrence, mainly due to the mega success of the Aminet Set 1 pack. You get four CD's in one pack for about £30. All the programs are archived so you get about 4 gigabytes of PD for your money. The second quad pack just recently released is the UPD CD pack. I thought the UPD set had been put together a little sloppily in places, but you can't fault the CD for quantity. Aminet Set 2 is now out. This CD set will of course break all CD sales records, especially if offered in conjunction with a bargain deal or two. So why do the majority of CD suppliers target Aminet Cd buyers? It is because every Aminet CD sells by the bucket load, why is that then? I talked to a few CD suppliers and the general consensus is that it is partly due to all the media hype going on about the Internet and the general mystique of Aminet to non-modem users. But what really sells the Aminet CD's apparently is the simple to use front end that is so perfectly put together. I agree, you can smell the hard work that has gone into the production of each Aminet CD. You rarely find a button that doesn't work and I have yet to find a corrupt archive on any Aminet CD, unlike plenty of other CD's I have used. The other big factor I think, is the quantity. Everything is Lha archived (bar a few DMS files) giving excellent compression and about 1 gigabyte on each CD. My only niggle, and I am sure it is plenty of other people's niggle too, is the fact that each new Aminet CD usually has a percentage of programs that were on the last CD. This must put quite a few people off buying say, Aminet 5,6,7,8, I just bought Aminet's 5 and 7 and was really happy with the contents. If the people behind the Aminet CD's only released a new CD when they had a complete CD full of new or updated programs us bargain hunters would be the first in the queue to buy each one as it is released! Of course this all begs a very important question. How long before every bit of worthy PD has been put onto CD? There is only so much new material available after all! This situation will come about soon and will probably herald a new phase in the CD market, like it has on the P.C, MULTIMEDIA, Oh no! It's the only way to go really. Soon every other new CD will be an encyclopedia or interactive tutorial, but at least it will be fairly original, for a while at least. I notice that there are very few Amiga CD developers that seem to realize that Multimedia is the next phase in the growth of the CD market on the Amiga. One that does seem to is Active software. After a very long chat with Chris wiles of Active, I am convinced that Active Software, will for a time a least, be the market leader when the PD river runs dry. Chris has a lot of very original CD's in production. Most of them I am not allowed to tell you about. One I can tell you about though is a CD called "Get Started" it is an Amiga Multimedia tutorial covering many aspects of using your Amiga from programming in Amos, Blitz, Assembler and C to using the Workbench and creating graphics. Get Started should be almost ready by the time you read this. Chris also pointed out that he does plenty of good value CD packs, check out his adverts in the Amiga press. So, Is all this CD price-cutting and bargain offers good for the CD market? Well, it's great for us consumers in the short term, but in the long term we may suffer the effect of poorer quality and possibly even quantity. CD producers will have less development time and money to spend on producing high quality CD's. There are always casualties in any war and the CD war is no exception, let's just hope that the good PD libraries, (you know, the one's that are helping to keep the Amiga alive!) Manage to survive to keep the Amiga flag flying. At the moment it's great fun collecting hundreds of gigabytes of freely distributable software, enjoy it while it lasts. Contacts: Epic Marketing 01793-490988 First Computer Centre 0113-2319444 P.D Soft 01702-466933 Steve Bye