Article 922 of comp.sys.amiga.announce: Path: news.csos.orst.edu!flop.ENGR.ORST.EDU!reuter.cse.ogi.edu!uwm.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!emory!news-feed-2.peachnet.edu!ukma!mthvax.cs.miami.edu!megalith!NOT-FOR-MAIL Reply-To: fnf@fishpond.cygnus.com (Fred Fish) Message-Number: 722 Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.misc Distribution: world Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.announce Approved: overlord@megalith.miami.fl.us MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit From: fnf@fishpond.cygnus.com (Fred Fish) Subject: The Fishing Report - Mar 94 Message-ID: Date: Fri, 11 Mar 94 01:12:10 EST Lines: 179 T H E F I S H I N G R E P O R T March 8, 1994 ----------------- PREVIOUS CD-ROM's ----------------- I still have a limited quantity (15) of the Oct-93 FreshFish CD-ROM's available, plus a very limited quantity (10) of the Hypermedia Version 1.7 CD-ROM's (floppy disks 1-900). These disks are available on a first-come first-served basis for $19.95 plus shipping and handling. At this time, the Dec-93 FreshFish CD-ROM's are sold out. ----------------- FRESHFISH CD-ROM's ----------------- As I write this, the third FreshFish CD-ROM (March/April 1994) is going into production and should start shipping about March 12th. I decided to start doing like magazines do, and name the CD-ROM for the period over which it is expected to be current, rather than the period over which it was created. It was delayed about a week due to my switching mastering software and the need to test the resulting disk with several different CD-ROM drivers. The next FreshFish CD-ROM will be the May/June issue, and is expected to be available in the first couple weeks of May. ------------------- FROZENFISH CD-ROM's ------------------- The "quarterly" CD-ROM's have been officially named the "FrozenFish" CD-ROM's, both to give them a more interesting name and to remove the implication that there will be four issues per year. The current plan is to issue FrozenFish CD-ROM's after every third or forth FreshFish CD-ROM. Given the current production schedule of FreshFish CD-ROM's, that would mean a new FrozenFish CD-ROM about every 6-8 months. Work is now proceeding on the first FrozenFish CD-ROM, and it is expected to be ready for distribution during the last half of March. It will contain at least all the new material off of the previous three FreshFish CD-ROM's, as well as possibly some of the other material off the FreshFish CD-ROM's, all in archived form. This will still leave a considerable amount of free space on the CD-ROM, which I plan to fill with material from the floppy library (in archived form), working backwards from the most recently released floppy disk. It is very likely that I will be able to include the entire contents of disks 1-975, but I won't know until fairly late in the construction process. ----------------- GOLDFISH CD-ROM's ----------------- What was previously referred to as the 1000 disk archive CD-ROM is now officially named the "GoldFish" CD-ROM. This will actually be a two CD set, in a single slimline jewel case, and will contain the entire contents of the 1000 disk floppy library in both archived (BBS ready) and unarchived form. The first CD will contain disks 1-750 in unarchived form and the second CD will contain disks 751-1000 in unarchived form as well as disks 1-1000 in archived form. The GoldFish CD-ROM will contain a program that makes it simple to create master floppy disks directly off the CD-ROM, for further duplication and distribution. It will also have more direct support for BBS systems than has been previously included on the Fresh Fish CD-ROM's (files.bbs files for example). We are now in the process of creating the last 25 floppy disks (976-1000), and should be ready to start finalizing the GoldFish CD-ROM about the end of March. It is expected to be ready for distribution during the first half of April. --------------------------- FUTURE FLOPPY DISK RELEASES --------------------------- Once I reach disk 1000, I will no longer continue to produce a floppy disk based distribution. When I first announced this several months ago, a number of organizations and individuals inquired about taking over this job and continuing the library past disk 1000, with my "official blessing". I have selected Amazing Computing (PIM Publications) for this job, based on their longtime commitment to the Amiga. The conditions of continuing to keep my endorsement as the official continuation of the floppy based library include adherence to my standards for quality, production values (look and feel), and free redistribution of the resulting work. The plan is that they will select the best bits and pieces off each FreshFish CD-ROM, and organize new floppy releases using this material. They may of course, decide to incorporate material from other sources as well. ------------------ PRODUCT-INFO FILES ------------------ Material included in future CD-ROM distributions will be accompanied by a file that contains information about the material, for various database programs or other tools to use to index specific types of material, find specific programs, etc. This file, currently called a "Product-Info" file, contains important information like the program name, version number, author information, short and long descriptions, etc. A specification exists (included on the March/April FreshFish CD-ROM in the Information directory) which authors can follow to generate appropriate Product-Info files for previously released material or future releases. Most of the work I will be doing for the FrozenFish and GoldFish CD-ROM's involves generating these Product-Info files so they can be used to build description files for BBS systems, databases for indexing tools included on the CD-ROM, etc. Currently I have a file tree containing more than 7000 Product-Info files that cover all 975 disks in the floppy library and much of the material on the previous three FreshFish CD-ROM's. Less than 10% of these were generated manually, the bulk of them were generated by mechanical translation of existing Contents files. Since manually generating accurate Product-Info files for previous releases is a massive effort, I am calling on all authors and other interested parties for help. Ideally, the author of specific material should submit updated Product-Info files, but anyone is free to do so. The tree of all current Product-Info files is periodically uploaded to aminet systems, in the fish/docs directory, under names like pifiles-MMDD.lha, so these can be used as a starting point. The archive also contains the latest Product-Info file specification. --------------------------- ISO-9660 MASTERING SOFTWARE --------------------------- For the March/April FreshFish CD-ROM, I switched mastering software. I am now using an enhanced version of mkisofs, which was written by Eric Youngdale, and enhanced by Frank Munkert to make it suitable for generating the "Amiga flavor" of ISO-9660. This software is covered by the GPL (GNU General Public License) and once a few more enhancements are made, myself or Frank will be working to get the changes folded back into the version maintained by Eric. In any case, the package will be available for anyone to use. Hopefully someone with detailed knowledge of Amiga Intuition programming will write a graphical user interface for it, thus making it even easier to use. ----------------- CDTV/CD32 BOOTING ----------------- One of the current side effects of switching to different mastering software is that support for directly booting the CD-ROM's on the CDTV/CD32 has been suspended. Because of the relatively high license fees that needed to be paid to Commodore for each CD-ROM sold (more than the cost of actually pressing the CD-ROM), and the relatively small numbers of users that currently actually make use of this feature, I have decided to produce royalty free CD-ROM's for the moment. The money previously spent on these fees can be put to better use to improve the CD-ROM distributions for the vast majority of current users that don't care about CDTV or CD32 bootability. This does not mean that the CD-ROM's cannot be used on a CDTV or CD32, just that users that wish to use them must acquire additional hardware. In the case of the CDTV, all that is required is a floppy disk drive to boot from, and a suitable bootable Work bench disk. In the case of the CD32, an additional requirement is an expansion box that provides a floppy disk port. Such expansion boxes are currently under development by a number of different companies and/or already available in certain markets. It is possible that when demand warrants it, I may do special versions of the CD-ROM's that are CDTV/CD32 bootable, or else produce CD-ROM's that are targeted directly for CDTV/CD32 users with considerably different content than current CD-ROM's. So these moves do not mean I am abandoning CDTV/CD32 users, or ignoring their needs, just that I am attempting to make the best use of available resources, and the payment of license fees on every CD-ROM was not judged to be cost effective at this time. ------------------- -Fred ><> -- Read all administrative posts before putting your post up. Mailing list: announce-request@cs.ucdavis.edu. Comments to CSAA@megalith.miami.fl.us. MAIL ALL COMP.SYS.AMIGA.ANNOUNCE ANNOUNCEMENTS TO announce@cs.ucdavis.edu.