Review: Aminet Set 2

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                           Review: Aminet Set 2
                            By:  Jason Compton 
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Geeze, if you miss one Aminet CD in the series you may as well just wait it
out and pick up the Aminet Set.

Aminet Set 1 last year took on the mammoth task of actually putting all of
the Aminet on CD-ROM.  It took four of them.

A year passed, and it took another four CDs just to get up to date.  That's
Aminet Set 2.  The snapshot was taken on October 21, 1995, which means it's
getting a bit old and gives you some idea just how long it took me to sit
down and get this review written.

Each disk is labeled (a bit confusingly) in lower-case letters, to avoid
conflicting mentally with the first set, and perhaps future sets.  They are
broken down into roughly logical divisions of Aminet subdirectories
(although the "Fun" category of demo, game, dev, disk, and hard certainly
covers a lot of definitions of the word).

How can I even begin to pretend it's possible to look through 2 gigs of
programs and offer a verdict?  The set is configured with the tried and
true, more or less, AmigaGuide interface which I like a great deal for
being fast and functional.  Searches do go on for a while, but what would
you expect?  Disk a is the launch point, as it has the master index.  You
can copy the search utility to a hard drive for convenience, because the
first disc is the only one with the global search.

It also has something that sets Aminet Set 2 a bit apart from being an
overwhelming compository of Amiga-only information, and that's the Project
Gutenburg book texts.  Nothing says we can't have a little culture.

In addition to this and the new files, each disk has some Aminet Set 1
Top-10 chart material to fill out the CDs.

What more can be said?  Amiga Report is on the first disc since the docs
directory is, so I'm relatively pleased.

If you missed a couple of discs last year, or are a big believer in
preserving collective wisdom, Aminet Set 2 is a very good investment at the
price (roughly US$45).  If you're looking for near-instantaneous access to
a whole lot of Amiga software it is equally suitable.  Picking up a set
such as this gives you a very broad collection of Amiga files, enough to
stave off mod-and-game cravings for quite some time, as well as providing a
nice collection of utilities and other software.  It is, after all, a
year's worth of Aminet.

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