By Kev Beardsworth...
Encyclopedia's on Cd Rom are very popular on
the PC but for Atari's there are - as far as I know - none. Many
suppliers view the Atari market as dead or dying and with this in mind
they aren't about to invest large sums of money in developing a CD Rom
based encyclopedia for the Atari. Take a closer look at the majority
of CD Rom pedia's on the market though and you'll see they are
supplied with their own viewing front end. All Atari software writers
have to do is replace this with an Atari compatible version. Atari CD
Master is just such a beast. The version of CD Master we tested was
designed to view the CD Rom encyclopedia called InfoPedia 2.0
by Softkey.
Atari CD Master is supplied on two double density disks in archived
format. The version we were supplied had the documents on the disks
but we were given a pre-release version. A printed manual may be
supplied when the product is eventually ready for sale. As it's simply
a matter of copying the self extracting archives to your hard drive
and then running them to unpack, installation shouldn't pose any
problems. Once this is done simply double click on INFOPEDI.PRG and
you're ready to explore the world of multi-media CD Rom
encyclopedia's. Perhaps I should rephrase that, you'll be ready to
explore the world of CD Rom encyclopedia's. I'll take out the
Multi-Media statement as that would be misleading. What CD Master does
is present you with a empty control window from which you control the
actions of CD Master as it interacts with InfoPedia. You can call up
an index window where you track down the subject you're interested in
by picking the letter it starts with. This will guide you to a list of
subjects starting with the chosen letter. When you've picked the topic
you wish to view InfoPedia loads and displays the text in a GEM
window. The control window then displays file names of pictures or
sounds that are related to the current topic. Clicking on their titles
loads and displays the picture or plays the sound or sample. Looking
at the text you'll notice that the formatting is a little out. This is
due I think to control codes being entered in the text so that it can
run neatly around the related pictures. As the pictures aren't
displayed with the text by Atari Cd Master it makes things look a
little untidy. Cd Master supports Speedo fonts so you can enhance the
display easily, the makes Cd Master's formatting less of a problem.
Multi Media CD Master certainly isn't. Clicking on a picture file to
load shows up another potential problem, that of little memory. Many
pictures and even sounds would not display on my 4Mb Falcon because I
didn't have enough memory. There is a way around this, access the CD
Rom from the desktop and use your normal software to display the
pictures or sounds. While doing this I discovered many AVI movie
files. These aren't accessible via CD Master, which is a shame but
many of them are viewable using Movie Player. CD Master uses normal
viewers for the purposes of displaying graphics and playing samples so
perhaps later versions will be supplied with a movie player of some
description.
The text display highlights certain words which are related to other subjects on
the InfoPedia CD. Clicking on these "links" allows you to view related subjects.
Two other functions are available from within CD Master control window.
Namely Search and WFB. Search displays a dialog box where search criteria can
be entered to find elusive subjects. WFB is the World Facts Book. Here
information about countries from around the world can be viewed complete with
maps of the countries in question.
It's a shame that CD Master doesn't display the information from the
InfoPedia CD in a neater multi media way but thinking about it this
isn't really possible. After all The InfoPedia CD recommends 8Mb of
RAM and quite a powerful PC system. With this in mind CD Master copes
admirably.
Here we can see InfoPedia's control window, text window, index window and graphic display window.
The CD Itself
Turning our attention to InfoPedia itself there is quite a lot of information to
view. Included on the CD is:
- 200000 entries, including over 150 videos and animations. There are over 5000 photos, 2100 maps, logs, charts and tables, with over 450 sound clips.
- 29 volume Funk and Wagnalls new encyclopedia.
- Rogets 21st century thesaurus.
- Hammond world atlas
- The 1995 World Almanac and book of facts.
- Merriam Websters Dictionary of quotations.
- Merriam Websters Dictionary of English usage
- Websters new Biographical Dictionary.
Obviously all this information isn't available to CD Master which
again is a shame but the information that is viewable is well written
and very detailed. When you consider that an ST can access this
information, all be it not in a multi media format, you can't help but
be impressed.
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| Contact: | System Solutions on 01753 832212 |
| E-Mail: | ssolutions@cix.compulink.co.uk |
| Price: | CD Rom and driver. £49.95+pp |