Review: Aminet Set 4

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                           Review: Aminet Set 4
                            By:  Jason Compton 
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The madness that is Aminet has launched yet another massive salvo!  

This one really took me by surprise.  Not only is it fairly close on the
heels of Aminet Set 3, but it has a specially included commercial software
package even more impressive than that on the Set 3.  This time, it's
DirOpus 5.11, complete with special upgrade offer to the significantly more
impressive DOpus 5.5!

This set reflects quite a bit of MOD and graphical activity on Aminet
lately, as over 2 gigs (uncompressed) of the new material comes from the
"mods" and "pix" drawers.  There are no new features in the interface
itself (still the good old AmigaGuide) and the disc organization is easy
enough to follow, with disc A acting as a catchall loosely organized under
"Tools", disc B holds the "gfx" and "pix" directories and is appropriately
enough labeled "Gfx", disc C is the "Fun" of the "demo" and "game"
directories, and the fourth disc is "Mods", with the comm, dev, mods, and
mus directories.  (Presumably, comm and dev wouldn't have fit on disc A,
likely because disc A also holds the material new since Aminet 16.)

Easy to navigate, or at least as easy as going through 4 CDs can be, each
disc has its own index and interface and updates you as to what's new and
where it came from.  (For example, Disc C also contains the MPEGs which are
fairly new to Aminet.)

The snapshot was taken a few days before Christmas, so it reflects roughly
the second half of 1996, which was a pretty busy time for Aminet.  Keep in
mind that the bulk of that was the aforementioned pictures and mods.

The DirOpus deal makes it nearly worth the price of admission on its own,
although 5.11 isn't nearly as good as 5.5.  (Only once 5.5 came out was I
ready to go whole-hog and use it as a full Workbench replacement, which is
working just fine as I write this.)  Buried on other discs are other
commercial titles--a couple of games and TurboCalc 2.1.

Aminet Set 4 is of course the dream for Aminet completists, or those who
just don't have time to keep up online but want to see what they've been
missing.  If you're already a Mods Anthology owner, are not particularly
interested in over a gig of graphics, and have been keeping up with Aminet
RECENT and have all you want, perhaps Set 4 isn't the best of buys for you.
But if not, it represents excellent value for what you're getting, the high
proportion of mods and graphics notwithstanding.

Published by Schatztruhe
Veronikastr. 33
D-45131 Essen
Germany

http://www.schatztruhe.de/

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