Path: news.uh.edu!barrett From: markus@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de (Markus Illenseer) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: Gold Fish CD-ROM Set Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.misc Date: 27 Jul 1994 23:54:50 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 422 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <316s4a$mot@masala.cc.uh.edu> Reply-To: markus@TechFak.Uni-Bielefeld.DE (Markus Illenseer) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Keywords: freeware, CD-ROM Originator: barrett@karazm.math.uh.edu PRODUCT NAME Gold Fish CD-ROM Set BRIEF DESCRIPTION The Gold Fish CD-ROM is a 2 CD Set which contains the Fred Fish AmigaLibDisks 1 to 1000 in archived and unarchived form. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Name: Amiga Library Services Address: 610 North Alma School Road, Suite 18 Chandler, AZ 85244-3687 USA Telephone: (602) 917-0917 FAX: (602) 917-0917 In Germany, the CD may be purchased from: Stefan Ossowski Schatztruhe Gesellschaft für Software mbH Veronikastraße 33 45131 Essen Germany Telephone: +49 201 78 87 78 Fax: +49 201 79 84 47 and GTI Home Computer Centre Zimmermuehlenweg 73 61440 Oberursel Germany Telephone: +49 6171 8 59 34 Fax: +49 6171 83 02 BTX: *GTI# Other dealers will follow. LIST PRICE Suggested retail price is $24.95 (US), or approximately DM 39,90. Street price varies in a wide range, so please compare. Amiga Library Services offers the CD for $19.95 by direct sale. In Germany the price is higher due to import tax and shipping fees. All mentioned prices are for the complete CD set containing two CDs, although the CDs are packaged in one single (special) jewel box. SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE Any Amiga equipped with a CD-ROM drive. This includes the A570, A1270, CDTV, CD32 or any supported third party CD-ROM drive. 512KB of RAM required. At least 2 MB RAM is recommended, though 5-8 MB is more comfortable. A hard drive is required if you plan to copy or install some of the software packages on your Amiga. SOFTWARE AmigaDOS 1.3 or higher required. Works fine with AmigaDOS version 2. AmigaDOS version 3 is highly recommended. A CD-ROM filesystem is required such as AsimCDFS, AmiCDROM, Babel CDFS, Xetec CDFS, etc. The Commodore CDFS, supplied with AmigaDOS 3.1, is known to have some bugs with the tested CD, but it is suitable to get most of the stuff on the disc. AmiCDROM is on the CD itself. COPY PROTECTION None. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING Amiga 3000, 2 MB Chip RAM, 12 MB Fast RAM Several hard drives. Apple CD300 (same as Sony CDU-8003A) CD-ROM drive. AmiCDROM Version 1.10. REVIEW As a general overview, I would like to explain the why, what and wherefrom of this CD-ROM. I then will review the installation and the compilation of the CD. Throughout this review, when the word 'disk' is used, I mean a floppy disk from the Fred Fish library (the AmigaLibDisks). The word 'disc' is used to mean a CD-ROM. Please don't be confused. :-) BACKGROUND INFORMATION The long awaited Golden Fish is here. It is the assemblage of 8 years of tremendous work of thousands of authors, artists, magicians, gurus and, last but not least, Fred Fish. Here is a little history about how this disc came to be. Since the the Amiga's introduction in late 1985, in the days of net.micro.amiga (Usenet's dawn), when the real Gurus attempted to discover a wonderful machine, Fred Fish assembled freely available and distributable stuff and made it available through a floppy disk-based distribution for Amiga-freaks all over the world. The success of his series is without compare. Fred gathered huge amounts of Amiga 'stuff' by fishing around networks himself, or by having authors submit their material directly. No other disk series has ever had similar luck and acceptance over the years - although the number of direct subscribers was never high enough to make it reasonable to continue the series.... In 1993, Fred announced that the number of direct subscribers to the floppy distribution was not large enough to continue the distribution. The number of subscribers increased from 41 to 75 after a call for subscribers in mid-1993, but that was still far fewer than the 150 required subscribers which would be essential to survive. As a solution, Fred finally decided to go one step further, switching from floppy disks to modern mass media: CD-ROM. This was an eventful step with many risks but also many advantages. The 'Fresh Fish CD' was born. Its success allowed Fred to stop the floppy disk distribution. The response was rather good. It is too much work for the small company to continue both floppy disk based and CD based distribution. There are some other volunteers to continue the floppy disk based distribution (i.e., Amazing Computers in the US or SAAR-AG in Germany). To give the end users a bit of time, he continued his normal AmigaLibDisk floppy series up to number 1000. This was achieved in December 1993. Since then, Fred has distributed his material on CD-ROM only. GOLD FISH The Gold Fish CD-ROM (from now on called GF) is a 2-disc set that contains all of the original AmigaLibDisk series (except for disk 0, which was eaten by Fred's dog :-)). Not a single file is missing, except for some copyrighted material he had to delete, making this disc set a wonderful treasure to keep you busy for days. Every floppy disk is made available on the CD in both archived form (lha archives), and unarchived form (normal directory structure of the disks). The first CD contains disks 1-1000 in archived form, and disk 1-249 in unarchived form. Disk two contains disks 250-1000 in unarchived form. This makes 650MB for each CD - the maximum a CD can contain. The first CD contains the archived floppy disks in a BBS directory for direct use in a BBS (Bulletin Board System) or on an anonymous FTP site on the Internet. This directory contains a subdirectory for each disk. In these thousands of subdirectories are archives for each software package. There are no archives for the entire disks. A program called 'PufferFish' creates redistributable - original - Fred Fish floppy disks out of these archives. GF comes in a nice, slimline jewel box that holds two CDs in the space of an ordinary, single-CD jewelbox, for convenient storage. GF was mastered in the ISO 9660 Mode 2 format (hence no crippled, MS-DOS format filenames). I couldn't locate any directory-level deeper than 4 or 5; hence, the CD is ISO-compliant and will work with almost every ISO filesystem. During the making of a CD, due to a missing 'feature' of the ISO-9660 filesystem, which is used on every good CD-ROM, the original Amiga protection bits are gone (e.g., Script, Archive, Execute, and also filenotes). This makes it impossible to start shell-scripts directly off the CD if they make use of the S-Bit (Script). Fortunately, there are not that many tools on GF depending on this. The only (supplied) way to restore a file's original protection bits is by extracting it from its corresponding lha archives in the BBS directory. (A technical note: it *is* possible to store the missing flags and filenotes. ISO-9660 and the Rockridge Extension do support this, but both the ISO image (during creation of the CD) and the CD-ROM filesystem have to support that extension. INSTALLATION There is no installation required. A simple 'setup' script expands search paths to LIBS: and C: on the CD for supplied libraries and commonly used tools like 'MuchMore'. USAGE What to do with such immense source of programs, goodies, tools, pictures, sounds, and texts? Indeed, the purpose of an archive CD is limited. It can be seen a large and useful backup medium, or as useless, hopelessly outdated trashcan. Your mileage may vary. One could just browse through the entire disc -- a man-life of work (mythical man month :-)) and get lost in the depths of icons, directories and documentation. One could search for specific stuff. For that purpose, four methods are provided. The first is the file "FileList", which is found on the first CD. This file is probably the fastest and most useful way to find distributions. It covers only the BBS part of the (first) CD. Second are the two "CRCList" files on both CDs. These files contain the entire file tree of the CDs (that is, the full name of every file) with CRC (Checksum) information. This method is best for finding single files. It covers all material on both CDs. For these first two methods, a tool like 'grep', 'c:search' or an editor with a search function is required. The third method is AKwic, a simple GUI using its own database, searching for normal strings in filenames. Quite fast and reasonable. I like that it displays all found matches and then asks you for a further choice rather than showing you only the first match and then asking you to search for the next match. It covers only the BBS part of the (first) CD. The last tool is KingFisher. This program is a big one. The entire library has been catalogued, classified and merged together in this database program. KingFisher is complex and demands a bit of knowledge about how a database (like Lotus, Excel or somesuch) works and how to find specific stuff. KingFisher allows you to search for a wild range of keywords such as 'name', 'graphics', 'author' and more. This enables you to find related or similar programs,. Unfortunately KingFisher is a bit a too large of a program to be used every now and then. Covers only the BBS part of the (first) CD. It is quite annoying that both AKwic and KingFisher don't cover the unarchived material of GF. The unarchived part of the GF contains most of the stuff assembled in the way the original floppy disks contained the packages. This is even the way the authors or submitters send the material to Fred or elsewhere. Unfortunately not all the packages are really unarchived. Mostly, source code hasn't been unarchived and left assembled archived. This sure saves rare disk space, as is - funny enough - required for GF for not being a 3 CD set. GF is *full*: not a single megabyte more is available. The argument is left to the user. Note that the original file and directory structure of the floppy disks has not been changed in any way. Not a single icon has been altered. GF contains often used programs like Installer, MuchMore, AmigaGuide and more, so that you can use most of the installed software packages directly off the CD. Most of the packages though are intended to be installed on a hard drive, as they are either complex packages which quickly alter files and need a writable medium, or are simple tools required at startup time. Games, hacks and texts can be left on the CD of course. You name it. I can't review the material on the CD - it's hopeless. Let's just say that there's too much stuff on it. :-) LIKES AND DISLIKES I hate being forced to swap the two CD's every now and then, but that is a feature of GF - too much material to be assembled on one CD. And then again, what is swapping of two CD's compared to playing "disk jockey for thousands of floppy disks? Also, I really hate the text viewer 'MuchMore' used all over. And there is almost no way around this, as most (all?) entries of it ask for a ':C/muchmore' rather than to use 'muchmore' and leave the rest to the file search path of AmigaDOS. Then I could rename my lovable 'More' to 'MuchMore' and use that one. There are even other possibilities, quite fancy, but these would require a complete rework of the CD, which is not the goal of GF. [MODERATOR'S NOTE: The problem that Markus mentions can be solved. If you are running AmigaDOS 2.04 or higher, check out the program ToolAlias on Aminet. ToolAlias is a commodity that substitutes one tool for another without actually changing the icon. For example, you can specify that whenever someone clicks on an icon with the tool ":C/muchmore", the program "sys:utilities/more" is automatically used instead. I have been using the program for a year and have found it to be quite stable. - Dan] I don't claim to be a Workbench user -- I barely use it -- but I don't like the look of GF on the Workbench. Sometimes the windows open at random positions. Some icons look fancy, shiny or are unusable. But I must acknowledge that this is the way the material was submitted by the authors and it never was an intention of Fred to change any material. So I must blame the authors. *BLAME* :-) I like the general compilation. I started - years ago - with Fred Fish Disk #75, and never really had a chance to look at earlier material. Also, over the years, I lost track of sometimes quickly updated disks, hence GF offers me a chance to keep up. There is quite a lot of material I've never seen before, although I had the possibility to grab them every day via BBS or ftp. But I simply didn't know about them... who can read all those 'Contents' files? What a pity that some of the material can be found updated every 20 disks. But that was important at the time Fred distributed his floppy disks on a monthly base. I can't blame him for submitting an entirely complete archive. Shortly after GF was pressed, it was discovered that some files on the discs were copyrighted or contained viruses. (Strangely enough, they have been on the floppy disks for years!) These files have now been deleted and a new pressing of GF has been issued. (The first pressing is completely sold out.) Upgrade from first pressing to second is possible for a small fee. Write to Fred or Amiga Library Services for more information. Some other changes have also been involved, such as a bug-fixed KingFisher. If you have the first pressing, the virus-containing files won't affect your Amiga unless you happen to execute them. You can also write to Udo Schuermann for a new version of KingFisher with new features. Most probably also with updated Databases. A probable disease is that the CD contains outdated material. This is life. Everything changes. Some of the material is timeless and can't be found elsewhere, some stuff has never been updated since, whereas other stuff is updated so often that the most recent version does not appear on GF. COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS There is only one product which contains lot of Fred Fish Disks, this was the (nowadays) way overpriced CD from Almathera, which contains the disks 1-750 in unarchived form. Unfortunately, I can't compare GF with this CD because I don't own it and never had a chance to borrow it. I don't know if there is a database tool for quick access of material. [MODERATOR'S NOTE: There have been several other Fish Disk CD-ROM's in existence. Hypermedia produced 7 versions of their "Fred Fish Collection" CD-ROM, Asimware Innovations produced "FishMarket", Xetec produced two "Fish and More" discs, and possibly there have been others. - Dan] The Fresh Fish CD's also contain some of the last disk based material, but I don't think I should compare that with this entire archive. Similar to the GF is the 'Frozen Fish' CD from Fred Fish. This is a single CD based archive CD, which contains disk 1-1000 in archived form. Last minute: Fred also informed me, that he intends to release a special PC/BBS form of the Frozen Fish with disk #1-1000 as 1000 individual lha archives, one archive per floppy disk. The only other floppy disk based series, which made its way to a CD I know of, are the German AMOK and SAAR series. They made a CD containing about 730 disks in unarchived form. Fortunately enough it seems that this CD is not a subset of any of Fred's material, but a completely own archive. This CD is intended for German users, as many of the texts and programs haven't been translated into English. As the last several hundreds Fred Fish AmigaLibDisks were sometimes a subset of material found on the Aminet ftp sites, I should compare GF with the existing Aminet CDs, but I think this would turn into some sort of religious war. :-) CONCLUSIONS The GF is a must for every Amiga User. Either for personal use, for shared use with friends, to be made available on BBS or via FTP - this archive is what you need. It is also a nice family album of the world-wide Amiga community. For a future release of GF (it is not required, and I think will never be done), I would like to see a KingFisher which is far more easy to use. Also it should cover _all_ supplied material. [MODERATOR'S NOTE: Kingfisher is continually being updated, and an official release is scheduled soon. The program does not need to be physically on the CD-ROM: you can install it on your hard drive. - Dan] GF is a reliable product, which is quite usable. I rate it 4 out of 5 stars. The last star can be achieved if the CD becomes cheaper - but this is up to you. Support the makers of Amiga specific CDs and make it possible to issue large amounts of CDs. The higher the amount, the lower the price! COPYRIGHT NOTICE This review represents my honest opinion. Your mileage may vary -- tell me about it! Copyright 1994 Markus Illenseer. All rights reserved. You can contact the author at: Markus Illenseer Kurt Schumacherstr. 16 33613 Bielefeld GERMANY Voice: ++49 (0)521 103995 markus@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews