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A case of too many Mars bars?
Recently, APC&TCP [1] published a CD compilation of the disk series Faces Of Mars, or for short, FOM. Priced at 29,95 DEM (about 15 Euros), it is an attempt to collect the highlights of the series, with two audio tracks thrown in for good measure. Naming the CD after the disk series hints at the contents: the main topics are space, science-fiction, UFOs, fantasy and esoterica.
Carsten Schroeder kindly provided me with FOM 2001 for a test. I ran it on an Amiga 3000D with AmigaOS 3.5, 68040 CPU, supported by a Retina ZIII with CyberGFX 3.x and 36 MB of RAM.
When you open the CD from Workbench, you get a tidy window with the contents of the root directory of the disc. An HTML readme-file in several languages beckons in the upper part of the window. I could not resist, and clicked on it expectantly. Not a good idea: it didn't open a browser window, just displayed an error message.
The CD's creator seems to have been on the wrong planet and didn't choose the correct icon type (the file icon is a program icon instead of a project). HTML files aren't executable, and AmigaOS can intuit nothing but an error message. Sadly, this icon-type mistake happens elsewhere on this CD. Many pictures and texts can't be accessed from the Workbench.
Bad planetary alignments happen. But because of this mistake, the effort that has been put into making this CD Workbench friendly has vanished into a black hole. The intrepid Amigan has to call on a file manager like DirectoryOpus to explore parts of this CD-ROM.
After firing up a browser to display the readme file, you are assured that all programs have been tested with AmigaOS 3.5 and treated to a short summary of the legal differences between shareware and freeware.
What you can't find is a better description of the contents or any navigation help through the data jungle on this disc. There is no mention of the creators of the disk series, but there are offline-accessible web pages that are mirrored on the CD. Keep searching and you find under the URL "3Pyramids^2" a hint that in "amiga-archive" there is something which might be a directory structure of the CD. But unfortunately, you had better be online because the links do not point to the CD directories, but into the great internet void.[2] But it does let you subscribe to a mailing list.
By now, we were starting to get the hang of not looking in the obvious place for anything, and we eventually found:
A directory "1982", containing nearly 28 MB. Here lurks a wild collection of classic Amiga games from Archon to Zaxxon, which might just have a loose connection to the theme of the disk series, but only if you stretch the imagination.
"Babylon 5", with 15 MB, mostly pictures (13.5 MB) of said SF-series. Good quality, but not very high resolution. "Text" contains a few English texts, and in "Tools", amongst other things, some taglines for YAM.
A little less than 700 kB found its way into the "Esoterik" directory. A job lot of biorhythm programs, partner testers, a Chinese Oracle and a prediction about your future... Many of these programs are based on Cursor by Juergen Forster and are not too happy with graphic boards. The assurance that all programs were tested with OS3.5 seems not to apply here. LifeCycles1.1 obviously thought mine was at a low point and crashed my Amiga (reproducible).
The 8 MB "Fantasy" directory contains eight pictures, several games (mostly adventures) and some English books from the Gutenberg project.
You might think that a directory called "FOM" would contain information about the disk series, but no. Besides a few pictures in Manga style, you can read two "FOM" stories and simultaneously listen to a soundtrack or view some pictures - well, that's what the AmigaGuide promises. But unfortunately, the guides weren't adapted for use on the CD, so they can't find the pictures and mods.
The aforementioned web page mirrors can be found in "Webpages".
"Games" contains 6 MB of promotional games and demo versions of (by now) antique commercial games.
"History" presents in English, but not multimedia, some 12 MB of historic events including arcana like the atomic bomb and the bible.
The directories "Internet" and "Jokes" aren't worth the effort to describe here.
"Mathematics" (2 MB) contains some fractal-programs as well as some programs that have to do with mathematics in the widest sense. Remarkably, a rare appearance of ReflexFinal, which some older Amigans may know from the fish disks.
"Science" brings you the World-Fact-Book from 1994 as well as the interesting Eliza. And if you speak French, you can start VieIII. A French manual is included...
"ScienceFiction" contains 46 MB of data - animations, games, music modules and texts on the topic. You guessed: most pictures and all modules cannot be opened from the Workbench, wrong icon type again. The pictures are quite good-looking, some of the texts are partly in German, but most are taken from Project Gutenberg. Settle back and savour Jules Verne's "Around the World in 80 Days" or fly "From the Earth to the Moon".
Apropos fly - in "Space", the Amigan will spy flying saucers - pictures and text. Furthermore it contains some astronomical programs like DynamicSkies, Luna, and WorldTime for you to experiment with.
Of course, on a CD like this you can't leave out StarTrek. About 5 MB of data on this topic - a mixture of animations, pictures, music, a game (TrekTrivia), texts and a few tools.
Considerably bigger (at least 39 MB of data), the "StarWars" directory, another miscellany, completes our review. Conspicuous again is the simple copying of "Multimedia"-Guides without changing the path to pictures or sounds. Oh well, by now you are used to finding other ways to dig through the 14 MB of animations and 14 MB of pictures. And just like all the other directories, it doesn't have a picture catalog to help you get a better overview. Spookily, some pictures have a icon for JPEG, but are GIFs when you open them. But that's not really a problem, since Multiview can show both formats...
30 DEM is quite a high price for a compilation that is not particularly extensive and regularly spits the dummy on Workbench. Only passionate Amiga software collectors will flash the plastic and have no regrets. Most of what's here can be found on the Aminet or other FD-CD disk series. Being really picky, why weren't the disks of the FOM series included as DSM-archives - there was more than enough space left on the CD. But I suppose it was a pretty varied selection, even though Trekkies and StarWars fans won't find much new stuff. Can't help thinking, though, that if you are really interested in the borderland between science and belief (or superstition), you would do better with a book by Erich v. Daeniken for the same price.
[1] http://www.apc-tcp.deUwe Pannecke <Uwe.Pannecke@t-online.de>
