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@{"b"}The Wonders of CD ROM@{"ub"}  

I just thought I'd write this article to persuade any of you who might be thinking of getting a CD ROM drive...  

It wasn't too long ago when all there was was CD32 games and PD collections. Although these are good, things are much better now.  

I think the best thing is the amount of 'free' stuff you can pick up. A year or two ago, if you bought a CD ROM drive, you would then have to get CDs at around £20 a disk. I currently  have about 18 CD ROMs, and not one of them I have actually bought directly - they have all been (mainly) CoverCDs, as well as AF extra-CD giveaways, as well as a few special offers... So what I'm saying, you know longer have to worry about spending loads on CDs as well as the drive to make it worthwhile.  

CoverCDs are also an excellent thing about CDs. Before, when I bought a magazine, disks were just a nice little extra - there might be something you liked on there, or maybe not. Sometimes there was a commercial giveaway, but if it didn't all fit on the disks, then some might be missing (like spellcheckers in wordpros!) And the data was often crunched to fit it on there - fair enough, but you had to waste hard drive space every time, or worse still, find some extra floppies to copy to.  

Needless to say, all these problems go with a CoverCD. And there really is just so much stuff on there, it really is like a sort of Pandora's Box.  

I noticed a wierd effect when I first started using CD ROMs, although it wears off the more you use them. You first have a look around a CD, maybe find a few things you like, and then do something else; you're sort of fooled into thinking what you found was really all there was to see, maybe it's because of the difficulty in comprehending just how much data there is on a CD compared to a floppy.  

But then you come back for another look, and find a how load of other stuff you never found before. It's kind of wierd delving through all the different material, you sometimes forget you got all this spending just 5 or 6 quid on a magazine! I've found useful stuff on CD's many months after getting hold of that CD. The same's true with PD collections, if not more so. If there's a utility I need, I can just dive into Meeting Pearls 3, and there's bound to be something to fit my needs (well, uusally!) There's no need to go writing off to a PD Library, which of course is another reason to get a CD Drive.  

You could spend years collecting disks from libraries and swappers, get a CD drive, and double your collection just by buying a few discs. When it comes to PD collections of CD, there's no shortage of them on the Amiga. Collections of every thing you can think of. And back to those 'free' software - look at Amiga Format giving away the Phase CDs. It wasn't too long ago that my fonts collection was rather limited, but now I've got them coming out my ears!  

Programmers such as myself benefit a lot too. Firstly is information, like CoverCDs always have a 'Programming' drawer of things you may find useful, including developer tools as well as information. And there's the ability to contribute to CoverCDs themselves as an easy way to distribute your work. Okay, you can contribute if you have no CD, but it's kind of nice to see it on there yourself, otherwise you have no acknowledgement that it's actually been put on there. Maybe not as good as uploading to Aminet, but still a good way to distribute your work. Once upon a  time, you would send to PD libraries, but I really don't think it's worth it these days.  

If you're buying 'serious' software, plenty comes on CD, and you can always expect a better deal with the CD version.  

There are two areas lacking in Amiga CD ROM. Firstly, all that 'multimedia edutainment' crap. The fact that I've just refered to it as that should indicate that I'm not bothered about not being able buy '101 Love Letters' or whatever on CD.  

The other area, paradoxically, is games. I say paradoxically, as games were what initially got Amiga CD ROM moving, with the CD32. Unfortunately, with all this 'write Amiga games for '020/2MB' stuff, the games aren't really what you'd like for 1997. In a way, it was worse with CD, as developers seemed to think 'ah yes, CD. That means CD32 which has to mean '020/2MB'. Of course, there must be far more CD drive owners owning it via a non-CD32 Amiga, rather than actually owning a CD32.  

But hopefully, this attitude is changing, with Vulcan going CD only, and ClickBOOM working on CD-only Myst. And hopefully we will see a lot more games that take advantage of CD, rather than just the same as floppy, but (if you're lucky) an intro animation.  

There's also the thing about CDs being easier to copy and distribute, due to their more standard nature, rather than DD disks. We all know that Amiga games aren't found to often these days in high street shops, but I'm sure you noticed how this was the case even when Amiga games were selling just as well in the charts, if not more so, than PC games - maybe it was the fact that PC was on CD, where as Amiga games weren't?  

Anyway, CDs are a great thing - if you get a drive, you won't regret it! As Stephen says, with Power doing a dual speed SCSI drive with  Squirrel SCSI and some CDs for just £100, it's a lot cheaper than it used to be! 
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 Magazine surveys indicate over half of us have CD ROMs already, which is quite an achievement since no Amiga has ever been sold with a CD drive as standard, even as an external add-on (expect now, surely, Direct's machine?) But there's still just under half of us without CD drives...   
 
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