Aminet 9 CD-ROM

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                            REVIEW: Aminet 9 CD
                            By:  Jason Compton 
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Aminet's Christmas release is out, and appropriately enough, Santa is on
the cover.

I'm pretty sure it's just an image from somewhere rather than Urban Mueller
in a big red suit.

Anyway, following closely on the heels of Aminet Set 2, Aminet 9 puts all
of the archive's games on the CD-ROM, including 5 aging commercial titles
that you're not supposed to give away.

Hey.  Wait a second.  This sounds awfully familiar...

Yes, released at just about the same time, Aminet 9 offers just about
everything, except the 70 "special commercial" titles, from Gamers' Delight
2.

In addition to the ~190 or so megs of compressed games, Aminet 9 boasts a
slew of material more recent than the 4-disc Aminet Set 2 (to be reviewed
in AR 4.02, backwards though that may be) and a superset slew of stuff more
recent than Aminet 8.  Older chart-topping material is included as well to
round out the disc to a comfortable 628 compressed megs.

The "new since Aminet 8" category is not specially indexed, but the "since
Set 2" is.  The former is explained as being because of the large amount of
new material (except the game archive), but considering the number of "top
download" material included, a special index would have been nice to have
for completists.

Nothing has changed much in the interface.  AmigaGuide as ever with
external prefs, you now get a lot of new mod file descriptions, only when
viewed in their individual directory.  Which is too bad, since the playlist
is really convenient.

Speaking of mods, it seems that more than usual are on this particular CD,
which is not necessarily an unwelcome feature--just unusual.  In fact, as
sheer space goes, the music directory far outweighs the other major
directories-nearly 100 megs, while its closest competition, docs, trails at
75 megs.  Most of the 75 megs in docs are the docs/etext directory, the
Project Gutenberg archives.

The 5 commercial games on the disc are indeed from Gamers' Delight 2, and
are fairly nondescript.  You may have a good time in Jumpman for a while,
but for me their inclusion was less interesting than the registered version
of Delitracker Aminet disc owners got recently.

Some 50 megs of demos are included, categorized generally by what will and
will not work on an A4000/040, which is a nice touch.

Unless you're IV'ed to the Aminet, it's tough to beat the convenience of
having it for yourself on CD-ROM, and the price, which hovers around US$20,
isn't bad at all for the ease of use and promptness of the material.
Aminet 9 doesn't come with the best "gifts", but then again I remember the
days when it didn't come with any "gifts" at all, and the CDs were still
good. 

Published by Stefan Ossowski's Schatztruhe
Veronikastr. 33
D-45151 Essen
Germany
++ 49 201 788 778
stefano@tchest.e.eunet.de

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