<html><head><title>Review of PDCD5</title></head><!--(c) G.C. '98 A.R.R.-->
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<center><h3>Review of PDCD5</h3></center>
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 Over the past two or three years, major public domain libraries, including APDL and the Datafile, have been compiling CDs of PD and shareware. Perhaps because of a perceived lack of quality in the public domain, these collections have sometimes been referred to as <i>shovelware</i>. In some cases, this may be true, but in this compilation, I don't think so.
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<h4>The Index...</h4>
<p>
 For those of you already familiar with the Datafile, the index software to the CD is the same as their catalogue, loading a cut-down version specifically for this CD. They decided to make use of the highlighted software names in this edition, usually dragged to the order software, so you can double-click on them to open the directory. This all works very well, and is very non-intrusive: it's quite easy to browse the CD without the index. All the pieces of software on the CD are contained within ArcFS archives; I have memories of the first Archimedes World cover CD-ROM, where they neglected to remember that the RISC OS filenames would become truncated to eight characters for DOS...
<p>
 A particular blessing given to us this CD is that, when an application is set to do something when the directory it is in is opened, Dave has very kindly moved the directory's contents into another, called <tt>InHere</tt>, to avoid having our nice window tools suddenly come out in blue and red. Another similar reassurance is the collection of Killer log files hanging around in directories, doing a fairly good job of putting our minds at rest on the subject of viri.
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 One most disturbing element of PDCD5 is the read errors it keeps having. Every so often, when reading a file or directory, the filer returns the error that it can't read audio CDs, or, even less frequently, it informs me of a physical bad block. The most confusing thing, however, is that pressing retry enough times or, occasionally, opening the CD-ROM tray and then retracting it, seems to get it to work again; I've not, as yet, been unable to access. I would suppose it was a problem with my drive, but my other CDs are fine, except for one: PDCD4. I think there's a good chance that it's my version of CDFS: the CD uses ten character filenames, which the driver may not be happy about, although the errors appear random. The moral of the story: always copy anything you use to your hard drive, RAM disc or a floppy before use.
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<h4>The Contents...</h4>
<p>
 Public Domain software often carries with it an image of poorly-written code, operating outside of the desktop or very slowly. For those expecting a lack of RISC OS-compliancy (as did, to a certain extent, I), having inspected the whole of the CD, I've found one piece of software that crashes on my ARM 610, one which resets the mouse speed and one not-multitasking, except for a lot of the games, which is perfectly normal anyway. All of the software on the CD will run on a StrongARM-equipped RiscPC.
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 The CD-ROM, as with the index, has been separated into various sections.
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<h4>An Alternative...</h4>
<p>
 <i>The Alternative Way of Life</i>, subtitled (in an almost dubious, feature film-like way) <i>The Meaning of Surrender</i> (although this has more technical significance), took a fairly hefty fifteen years to write and weighs in at almost six megs, so it's not a small volume. If you happen to have time to spare (if, say, you've just finished your G.C.S.E.s :-) ),  you may find this interesting, if you're attracted by theology and philosophy.
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 There is a religious basis to the work, but I don't think a religious background is especially necessary: the author's Islamic convictions are generally applicable to many religions and the text comfortably takes quotations from other Holy books; generally, the work deals with science and social topics.
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<h4>The Animations...</h4>
<p>
 Most of the offerings in this section are based on now aged-looking ray-traced animations, a few ACE files and some morphs. These certainly attracted attention several years ago, but look very dated now. If you're working on anything above an ARM 250, I'd recommend turning your caches off, in case some of the animations run too fast.
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 The most amusing thing in the section are the animation players. One plays the provided animations outside of the desktop. The other is a desktop animated sprite player, which runs <i>very</i> fast... with the cache off; it also comes with two great little animations.
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<h4>... and The Demos...</h4>
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 In complete contrast to the animations before, these do represent state-of-the-art graphics coding. The database mentions stunning demos, a subject on which we are not disappointed: we are treated to <a href="../Demos/TXPDemos">Blu and Era</a>, as well as <a href="../Demos/ID">the Iron Dignity Motion Demo</a> and Jan Vlietinck's fast 3D engine, rendering the Quake levels, provided, that is, you either have a StrongARM or a particular fascination for seeing animations run at two and a half frames per second. If you've got the CD of software with the StrongARM upgrade kit, you'll recognise a few of the examples on this one.
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 This collection, however, is thankfully not wholly RiscPC orientated: <a href="../Demos/Dreams">Liquid Dreams</a>, <a href="../Demos/JoJo">JoJo</a> and <a href="../Demos/iNsAniTY">iNsAniTY</a> show what can be done without a VIDC 20; not only do we get several demos from Baah of Arm's Tech, but he also provides tips on how to code.
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 If you've got VProtect loaded, some demos may refuse to run. This is just because they have code called <tt>code</tt> inside of them; it's probably just easier to kill VProtect, but you could always copy the demo to a writable drive, change the name of the code and edit the <tt>!Run</tt> file with the changed name.
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 In addition, Clares supply several demos of their commercial software, including Rhapsody 3 and ProArtisan24. Anyone with the ProArt2 CD'll spot them.
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<h4>Educational Aids...</h4>
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 Although other subjects, such as History, Geography and English are represented, this contains a sizable collection of science utilities, including software on atmospherics, mass spectroscopy, the Periodic Table and molar calculation (perfect for late night chemistry homeworks); there is also software for more advanced mathematical analysis, including a 3D equation plotter.
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 The range of software available spreads across many ages, with maths software on simple fractions and fourier curves.
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<h4>Something for the Weekend?</h4>
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 There's nothing too out of the ordinary in the games collection. I am very pleased to report that, in general, these games work without crashing my machine or reconfiguring my desktop.
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 More unusual items include Corewars, for any intrigued programmer or anyone who enjoys Life, Super Foul Egg, a Tetris variant (<FONT size=-1>*sigh*</FONT>) with cute graphics, a very nice desktop implementation of Risk and my favourite ever implementation of Space Invaders (mainly because it's the only one with keyboard autorepeat on the fire button) by Colin McEwan (the top of the help file alone made me kill myself laughing three times over and I think he's been peeking into Doggysoft code...).
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 In addition, a selection of flight sims, produced with FST, are present, which are still very enjoyable, even though FST-produced games are beginning to show their ages. It wouldn't be so difficult for Simis to produce a new, updated version of the <tt>fly</tt> code, providing for things such as gouraud shading and, perhaps, even the odd texture map, but nothing has appeared. Anyone interested in doing it?
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 Finally, to release frustration, anger and aggression, I recommend a game of GEK's NoWindows. As those familiar flying panes (in multiple senses of the word) are thrown at you, shoot them down. Ninety-five hours of fun! 
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<h4>The Gallery...</h4>
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 If you're considering buying PDCD5 for the artwork, it's probably not worth it, unless you happen to be particularly fond of Star Trek V. If you're really interested in space images, you'd probably be better off getting an image-specific production, because there isn't a <i>huge</i> number of images here and most of the space images are fairly unremarkable. The images presented are generally of high quality, but there are only a few themes here, none of which is particularly extensively catered for.
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 Also included are a few images produced using the Merlin 3D package. If you're wondering, Merlin is available on PDCD4, although you'll need to fork out another tenner if you're StrongARMed.
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<h4>Birds and Batteries...</h4>
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 As with the graphics, the selection of interactive fiction present is quite limited, compared to the range available on the internet; indeed, I have far more on my hard drive, which constantly amaze me by the size they take up (these files used to be distributed on tape). Having said that, there are enough there to keep you occupied for a reasonable amount of time.
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<h4>A Little Bedtime Reading...</h4>
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 The releases from the Gutenburg Project between the start of 1996 to the June of '97 are included here. In case you're not familiar with the Gutenburg Project, the aim is to produce downloadable copies of world literature.
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 Although it might seem very troublesome to search through the entire collection, stored in ZIP format (so you'll need SparkPlug, not ArcFS), Dave McCartney (you know, that person who runs the Datafile) has very kindly listed all the titles in the catalogue index, which literally saves you hours of work.
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<h4>The Utilities...</h4>
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 The first thing that strikes you about the utilities directories is their sheer size. Working in a large mode on a RiscPC, I still have to drop down to small icons to search through them effectively; those still using mode 12 better go out and get a bigger monitor. I certainly found myself wishing for an AKF85 far too many times during this review.
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 This large mass of archives, over one thousand in all, could well seem a daunting set to search through; indeed, I fear that my examinations of the software would have been very cursory, certainly not doing justice to the collection of software presented here, had it not been for this review, so I'm very happy to have done it! The collection is huge, but persevere with it: you <b>will</b> be rewarded for your pains.
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 Sensibly, everything's alphabetically sorted, although some letters have to span more than one directory, due to the very large number of archives within them; I don't think, due to the number of applications and the possible descriptions of genre for each, that a breakdown of software by function was entirely possible. You may be expecting a group of items of limited use or fair quality, but this collection regularly pulls something useful (for your needs) out of the hat.
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 There are a whole series of bitmap conversion utilities, from the mainstay of John Kortink's Translator, to some very detailed and proficient handlers for Amiga Interleaved Bitmap Interchange Files, TIFF files, Windows' ICO format, PPM files, Clear graphics, Targa format files, PCX and others, with several GIF animators (which all seem to be based on <a href="../PD/InterGif">InterGif</a>!) and a <i>very</i> thorough, configurable and detailed JPEG compressor and renderer (do you want to optimise your entropy-encoding parameters or decode with cross-block smoothing?). There's also a good deal of software with proper support for the RiscPC's 16.8 million colour deep sprites, including a viewer of such sprites for older machines, which can also clip them without needing to quantise them to 256 colours (an absolute, absolute, thorough, complete and total God send), a utility to quantise deep sprites and produce an optimal 256 colour palette (which, when I get around to using it, will be another of those complete and total God sends), comprehensive 24 bpp image processing tools and software for handling colour separations, which anyone who's ever tried to print professionally from an Acorn will know are, apart from Ovation Pro, a fairly limp area in the market. Also, there are several series of very nice (read: weird) backdrops; so taken am I by them that I'm considering putting one up myself and I'm the person still using 2D icons and System font on my RiscPC, here.
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 There's a (fairly old) player for AVI format files and a new port to the ARM of an MPEG-2 decoder, but, as this format is very difficult to implement in software, even a StrongARM will be taxed. Also, there's another collection of MPEG players for the original format, including one running smoothly on my ARM 610. FLI and FLC files are also catered for, this time with a desktop player; it comes with some very good 3D model animations recorded in the format and is quite capable of playing them, in the desktop, on an Archimedes, while RiscPC owners are treated to full 15bpp and 24bpp mode support.
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 On the vector graphics front, there's now support for conversion of Adobe Illustrated EPS, PDF and standard Postscript files to Draw format. Similarly, the readers for the mathematical typesetting language TeX are present on the CD, with a host of utilities. There are a couple of programs to help with making Draw files by script or from inside code and there is also a replacement module for Acorn's DrawFile module, which <i>can handle text areas</i> <b>properly</b> (at last!); a very handy utility paginates text area files correctly. For programming fans of 3D vector graphics, there's a tutorial on producing your own engine; you'll even find a 3D model editor! Similarly, <a href="../PD/Molecule">RasMol</a> also has a fairly large presence on this CD and comes with several scripts and a collection of molecular models.
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 There's a good deal of support for various sound sample and music formats, both foreign and domestic: there are converters to deal with RIFF WAVEs, VOCs, Audio IFFs (IFF/8SVX as well), Sun Audio and Psion 3a formats; a sample editor is also provided. The demo of <a href="ReMIDI">Michael-Dennis Biemans's MIDI player</a> is present, with a collection of files to test it out on. There is also software to deal with  Philip Hazel's Music Scribe markup format, which has the distinct advantage over most other sheet music editors or sequencers of speed of input. Finally, for those who have StrongARMs, fast hard drives and processing power to waste, go and get Windows&#174; 95 or, for a little less money, the utility on the CD to play sound samples on certain desktop events.
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 There are several pieces of software for compiling various common and less common high-level programming languages, including ADA, Fortran, Forth, Oberon, Python and the ubiquitous C; several of these are provided as part of the <a href="../../GCC">GCC</a> package of compilers. There are also machine code tools, for both the ARM and for cross-platform work, including software to make and link <a href="../../Compilers">AOF</a> files, utilities to examine the entry points and data of a module and assemblers for the Motorola 68HC11 and 68HC05 processors and the good ol' 6502. Wimp programmers are serviced by template editors, software to profile the desktop (so you can never again kid yourself that it's not vital to mask out null polls), a utility to monitor wimp messages and events, a great help to me when tracking down wimp message bugs in my code, and others to get the handles of icons and windows, peek at their flags and so on. A collection of <a href="../PD/BasSquash">BASIC compressors</a> is included as well as an index to the PRMs, which I have discovered to be absolutely essential. Another fairly essential piece of software, with a whole host of applets, which is also included, is <a href="../PD/Zap">Zap</a>, which you may have heard of...
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 There are several <a href="../../NetTerms/HTML">HTML</a> utilities supplied, including macro software for taking the pain out of endless copying down of tags, client and server-side image map generators, software to convert bookmark lists to actual HTML pages and software to convert HTML to and from rich text format, plain text files, Impression documents and Draw text areas, to name a few. Also provided is a <a href="../../NetTerms/Browser">web browser</a> Webite, and its sister application, the offline HTML reader SignPost.  In addition to the normal Utilities section's offerings, PDCD5 has the freeware Internet Starter Pack, which contains everything to get you up and running on the internet. The help given is slightly geared toward users who are going online with Demon Internet, although most everything is applicable to any other <a href="../../NetTerms/ISP">service provider</a>. This includes the browser ArcWeb, generally agreed to be the best of the platform's freeware browsers.
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 The utilities collection also contains a number of file-related assistants, including a suite to allow PC card users to access their Acorn drives from the PC side, some applications to convert DOS-formatted text to our own, including changing between our alphabet and Windows 3.1's, and others to convert those annoying capitalised filenames to nice mixed case ones, software to perform some filer operations, such as setting the type of a file, recursively through a whole directory tree, and comprehensive file finders, using names, filetypes, datestamps and contents. There's also software to handle the cache from a timer, which is especially useful on the StrongARM for getting old games and software to run, data encryption, the pinboard, advanced configuration and many, many more varied utilities. This has but scratched the surface.
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 I found over fifty applications I wanted to store on the hard drive, including two for my boot sequence, but space confined me. I managed to bring the list down to just below thirty five and my hard disc now registers a whopping four megabytes free. Finding only two applications to boot up with the machine may sound a small number, but my boot sequence, already forty seconds long, annoys me far too much for me to want to put anything but the most essential software there.
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<h4>Conclusions...</h4>
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 Before I began to review the CD, as I was just looking quickly over what was provided, I was already very impressed by the general quality of the software present; when I researched it in depth, I discovered that it was even better than I had discovered before! If, at any time, you loose faith in the quality of the Acorn PD scene, get this CD: it will restore your faith comprehensively. It was based on the quality that I got hold of PDCD4, the predecessor to this collection.
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 If you're, like me, reasonably well stocked on the current common utilities, this CD still holds many surprises: of the number of programs that eventually went on my hard drive, only about five were later versions of software I already had got, which I wouldn't begrudge. If you're fairly new to the Acorn world, this is a really good place to start gathering together a very good collection of PD, freeware and shareware software.
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 In addition, recently, the Datafile's CD collection has come down dramatically in price: now is a very good time to go out and get PDCD5 or, if you're a little braver, the entire PDCD collection; if the rest is half as good as this one, it'll be money well spent.
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Authors: Far, far too many...<br>
Status: Commercial, price 8-50, plus 1 P&P<br>
Availability: APDL, who have just taken over the Datafile<br>
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