CU Amiga Super CD-ROM 2/CU Amiga Magazine's Super CD-ROM 02 (1996)(EMAP Images)(GB)[!][issue 1996-04].iso/mat.readme

Text File | 1996-02-23 | 20KB | 332 lines

This here text file is more or less a diary of putting together the CD. I
don't know if it's of interest to anyone but it seemed a shame not to
extract some entertainment value out of some of the hideous problems that
arised during the making of the CUCD. Not the least massive hardware
failures, virus attacks and one solid month of late night 7 day weeks. This
is the story of the making of CU Amiga Magazine's CUCD.

<--- Diary begins --->

The idea of a month off from magazine writing duties sounded good to me. Good
excuse to lounge around the Internet, E-Mail everyone furiously and all I had
to do was copy a mere 650MB of stuff onto a hard drive. Well, I knew there was
going to be a lot more involved than that but I had no idea exactly what
horrors were destined to occur along the way.

The first thing was to buy a hard drive. Tony Horgan was making do with a
ridiculously small sub 200MB HD in his A1200 which was permanently full. He
could tell stories about how he'd have to delete stuff ruthlessly just to copy
new gear onto his drive. This sealed the decision to buy an IDE Gig+ drive so
that he could inherit it later. This had a problem in that my machine, a
trusty old A3000, doesn't have an IDE interface.

Blast, I had to transplant all my 'system' onto the office A4000/40. This has
the upshot that I'd get use of a 68040 machine which was my only real complaint
with the A3000. The patheticly slow 25Mhz 68030 would really drag on despite
Executive. Mainly it was because it's in near constant use as an Internet box.
Gating mail and news back and forth, tossing mailing lists and Fidonet stuff.
Networking to Tonys machine etc etc. My 'system' is really a GVP IO Extender,
GVP Spectrum 24/28 and an Oktagon SCSI card with an on board gig of it's own.
Dropped this in the A4000 and all was well. And faster. Wonderful.

Plonked the Gig on the 4000s IDE interface. Hell broke loose in the office as
other A1200s, A1200 MicroniK tower and CD32s were shuffled around to make up
for the lack of the A4000 machine being available for assorted use. I set down
to format the drive, nice 650MB AFS partition and set up the initial directory
structure. So far so good. Iconographics was chosen as the archive set since it
didn't need a path to be run to look real cool. Hell it looks cool in the stock
palette beleive it or not. Bloody 4000 didn't have enough memory to run my
system properly (A3000 was 14MB, I said it ran a LOT of stuff at the same time
including Shape Shifter. Yes, I refuse to touch real Macs in the office). 4MB
SIMMs were liberated from review accelerators and such forth. Finally got it up
to 14MB by using a SIMM of my own home 1220 kitted A1200. Missus is not happy
since Final Writer doesn't like a stock 2MB machine. What does?

I spent some time faxing out every PD House and CD compiler I could think of.
Final Writer and GP Fax are a glorious combination indeed. Replies, as is so
often sadly the case with Amiga firms, were not rapidly returned. Even 75%
through the CD, three quarters of those I faxed didn't bother to return my
calls. <sigh>. Marcus from 17 Bit Software was first cab off the rank and so
impressed was I that I rigged them up a drawer in the root of the CD and put
not one but three demos of their top CDs. Be sure to check out these CDs, a
good taster and useful to be sure but the full CDs are even better.

17 Bit's CDs are nicely driven by an AmigaGuide front end. 'Rexx to the rescue!
Some scripts were coded to read the AmigaGuides, nick the first few files from
each area (copying them to the CD HD) and modifying the final guide so that you
could only click on those files etc. It worked a charm and didn't talk very
long considering the sheer quanity of material that is in the 17 Bit PD drawer.
New scripts for each of the CDs was needed. A bit of manual hacking and assign
adding and such forth closed the 17 Bit section without any problems. My
psychological glasses were definately turning a distinct shade of pink.

The Party 95 collection was requested by quite a few readers on the
Internet mailing list. 80MB odd Dataworld anim is a site to behold though I'm
not sure how it'll play off CD at the end of the day. The other demos were a
royal pain the the rear. Some worked, some didn't. Some wouldn't work after
setpatch. Some had the graphics screwed up. Some, fortunately, worked without
event. It wouldn't surprise me if I'm bombarded by reader mail about demos that
don't work. <sigh> Ok they're nice but I sure wish those C00l C0derz or
whatever they want to call themselves would be a little more OS tolerant. I've
still got to put on a lot of Intros etc. Not sure if I'll have time.

*Note: This Party '95 demos that were infected with the HappyNewYear'96
virus. :-/

Got permition for Gold ED. MUI 3.2 was installed and also the fix (I had to
discover the bugs for myself at first and rapidly retreated to MUI 3.1). Nice
exclusive version of SuperView for the CD should give display capability on
virtually every kind of display including CyberGraphics which I can't live
without. Around about this time I noticed the machine start to crash fairly
regularly. I thought it might have been some underlying software conflicts etc.
Days in total were wasted trying to run diagnostic utilities, Mungwall,
Enforcer etc to track down the problems. They seemed to subside but still the
machine would crash in the middle of doing things and long fixes on my Internet
mail databases had to be performed.

Material started coming in via E-Mail. Games and such forth. Lots of it. Didn't
have time to sort it out. Sits on my SCSI drive pending. The entire mornings
were consumed with massive long E-Mail exchange sessions with various authors,
readers and other people about possible stuff to included. I started worrying
that game demos weren't happening.

At this time Stefan Ossowski of GTI (who let us have the Aminet CD for the
November issue) replied. He didn't want to do a thing with his other CDs (demos
etc). Apparently out of what he did with CU Amiga and the German Amiga Magazin,
his sales didn't change so he saw it as a waste of time. I'm disappointed that
his valiant efforts weren't rewarded by sales. I dearly hope our readers wont
just sit there waiting for the next covermounted CD to come along. Perhaps all
this top quality commercial software on floppies has lead readers to expect a
great deal without realising that companies depend on their custom for survival
and ultimately the market. Oh I could rant on but that's off topic and I'm not
here to indulge myself.

Tinkering on with demos, modules and Imagine mailing list archives/FAQs etc
took the next couple of days. Things sound promising for new CD demos. The
author of the excellent Light ROM said a demo was OK by him. Dialog started
with Paul LeSurf at Blittersoft.

Disaster struck.

The A4000 gurued constantly. I knew the Zorro daughterboard was bodgy.
Stripped the A4000, cleaned connectors. Reassembled. GVP Spectrum downgraded
to Z2 operation (bloody A4000 has a surface mounted Buster Rev 9) and disabled
loads of system software etc. Still it would guru. Eventually I found it was
happening by itself. Even booting with no SS. Ahhh, it's a hardware problem. I
knew the A4000 was on the way out. Without some serious diagnostics kit, a
schematics and a couple of days of work in a real workshop, I have no hope of
fixing it myself (yes I have a heavy electronics background). In the end I just
had to stop tinkering and acknowledge that the A4000 wasn't coming back and
pronounced life extinct at Wednesday 07-Feb-96 13:36:20. I know because that's
the datestamp on a the last SS backup.

I sat dumbstruck trying to think of something to do. Less than a week before
the glass master had to be with duplicators. I was looking down the barrel of
no weekend and late nights as it was let along with no A4000. Suddenly the
decision to buy an IDE drive sounded suspect. Amazing what you think of in
hindsite. I called most of our contacts to see if anyone had an A4000 lying
around for an emergency load or whatever. No avail. Visage kindly offered to
swap my desktop A3000 for their A4000 but since it had no drive and softkicked
3.1 off the drive IN the A4000, that's no go. Didn't fancy finding all of it
to reassemble anyway.

CD drive or no, I had work to do so I had no choice but to extract all the
boards from the carcass of the A4000 and transplant to the A3000 once again.
It fired up first time so at least I could keep up the E-Mail side of things.

U4ia announced he was actually the F8 artist on the #Amiga Internet IRC
channel. He also sent me a couple of modules. MadMan and Acid something (a
PC XM mod). He said I could use them if I told you all to WWW surf to
http://sw.cse.bris.ac.uk/public/u4ia.html. :-)

Jeremy Ford at Ground Zero PD sent in a very nice texture CD called Texture
Portfolia. A phone call and some persuation and he let me nick 25 pics for
the CD in a demo form. You'll find them in the rendering drawer. Bloody nice
they are too. The CD is real cool with thumbnail pics which made it easy to
pic the ones to include. Thanks Jeremy, hope people see how good the CD is
and pick up a copy.

Thanks have just GOT to go to Vince at Epic marketting. While I busted by
guts getting other demos that I had to made up, work on the CD etc, he just
send me a CD with a demo of two of his CDs ready to roll. All they needed
was a splash of Iconographics and away they went. The Sci-Fi front end is
real nice too. Thanks very much Vince for giving us a couple of demos of two
great CDs and with not much work on my part. I owe you a beer.

Monday 12-Feb-96 15:43:53

Disaster has struck again. The planned move to the MicroniKs tower so that I
could gain proper access to the IDE drive didn't go smoothly. First I spent
a couple of hours trying to get the keyboard to work on the MicroniK tower.
Rows of keys were failing. Dismantled the keyboard, no fault. Checked the
tower (much later) and discovered that the metal bracket on a couple of
Zorro cards was pushed into a ribbon cable shorting it out. Painstakenly
removed and re-inserted (which is a BITCH of a job), keyboard worked. System
booted. Worked fine for about 10 minutes, then suddenly the tower wouldn't
boot. Got out the diagnostic tools, Zorro boards weren't being mapped into
the address space. Again much stuffing around and I found that the splitter
board that fits onto the A1200 motherboard was skewed. No way to easily fix.
Complete dismantle of the unit. Some spacers inserted to make sure it stays
straight. Complete reassemble. Unit still does not function. I'm in a blind
rage by now. Nintendo Magazine playing cheesy old TV theme tunes for the
20th time does not help my inky black mood.

Gosh, everything back in the A3000 then. A4000 which I had promised to Lisa
would be available as a spare machine again (minus dead Zorro function) went
back onto a huge mount of junk and was parnetted up once again. An entire
days worth of work for absolutely no gain whatsoever. Today had better be an
improvement or I'll start thinking about other career options.

Tuesday.

Had some dramas on Tuesday with my main SCSI drive becoming corrupt. Using
AFS this meant I had to copy everying off and back on. Oh dear, how was I to
do that when the only drive with that much space on it was the IDE. Mucked
about with the MicroniK tower but discovered that some bod had ruined the
PCMCIA port on it. Tried in vein to fix the bent pins on that AND another
1200 which was also ruined. Finally fixed the drive. <sigh> Another half day
with nothing done. Fortunately, Some stuff turned up in E-Mail and I got
some good stuff on the CD. The massive Zeus BBS system demo might just tempt
some people into being foolhardy enough to want to run a BBS. Thanks to Nick
Loman for delivering this unique archive and giving us the mother of all
BBSes on a CD. To cap that day off I tried to compile at least one entire
Worms sample replacement set by using some others and my own. Several hours
later, about half the samples are finished. Spent the evenning on the 'net,
trying to hassle people for material including, thank God, a brilliant Blitz
Demo with loads of support files. Speaking of support files, I have to admit
I raped the Aminet of Amiga E files and extracted to a directory. Lazy but
darned effective for any Amiga E people out there.

Wednesday 14-Feb-96 13:24:03

Did some tidying on the CD. Orpheus mods, 9 bit jobs etc. Need a player. Had
to use Delitracker since it's the only module player that will let me select
a player via tooltypes even though it has a stupid way of doing it. The 14
bit player for the excellent 9 bit mods is in it's own drawer. 9 bit mod
icons point to it. Delitracker does it's thang. Lot of work, hope some
people listen to them. Since the CD hasn't got much Magazine related files
and Audio stuff yet, I threw the Zip drive at Tony and he's now filling it
up with lovely stuff including some high quality samples though sadly not as
much as his entire awesome collection that featured on the Aminet CD last
November. Just remembered. Left out two files from the darned Pronet archive
on a floppy couple of months back (doh!), better put them on the CD.

Thursday 15-Feb-96 14:28:51

Today was productive. Got the Nemac IV game demo off the 'net. Sadeness' Zip
arrived and fortunately only needed copying across. Before this, of course,
Tony gave me back the Zip and I shoveled over his 17MB of samples and mods
etc. 551MB so far. Last night I tidied up the icons drastically, got rid of
large pic icons I had to make the root directory smaller. Looking quit tidy.
A copy off the Oceania section of Alex Armours World Info '95 html CD
completed the efforts. All I have to do is figure out how to tie in a front
page to point to all the others. Got a huge Babylon5 SpaceMan mod on their
too. Quite a good rendition. Lots of other assorted work done but had to
take time out to right Points of View and another part of the mag. Man,
loads of work to do but no time left to do it.

My God, it's been more productive. Game Demos including a new version of
Breathless, Speris Legacy etc and even the Leading Lap demo turned up (for
floppies too). Then I decided to shovel the Fresh Fonts I + II material I
needed. In one day I've shot up to 600 odd MB! Lots of odds 'n sods. On the
'net, U4ia did me a couple of mods out of a sample that really lit my fire.
Thanks to him again. There's only around 40 odd MB left. Out of that I've
still got to fit Hi-Softs demos, Blitz Basic II, XTR tracks and much more.
Oh dear. Trouble is, I could have done with all this stuff much earlier.
Luckily I can always cut and pad to size with the Fresh Fonts collection. I
talked Daniel Armour into letting me stick some Adobe fonts on. So we've got
DMF for Pagestream, Adobe for Imagine and Intellifont for everything else.
Wickedness.

Hell I might make it just a 10 hour day just to celebrate. :-)

Argh! NYPD Blues on tonight. I'm gone!

Several days and a weekend have gone by without a note in this journal. the
additions were too many to note. However some key stuff happened that's
important enough to note. The CD deadline WAS this Monday the 19th of Feb. I
was at work the entire weekend and here until 2am on Monday morning with my
Wife (she was testing bits of the CD). 10pm that night I got confirmation
that I could use material from Light ROM for a demo. Ouch! Deleted some of
the 47MB of ScreamTracker mods (very nice BTW) to make room for about 20MB
odd of Imagine objects. Wasn't worth using DEMs since they were all from
stateside, I thought of our Imagine kitted readers first most. I hope you
lot will pick up the Amiga 3D CD from BlitterSoft. 14 quid odd for about
170MB of Imagine objects and a whole load of nice bitmapped textures etc.
MMm Mmmm.

Monday was errr Interesting. On the day of the deadline I discovered that
Virus Checker was useless at finding new virii. VirusZ found a massive
infection of the HappyNewYear96 virus. Not just on my own main drive but on
the CD image too. It took half the day to eradicate this from everywhere in
the office. My and on the issue where we we're running a Virus feature. Dear
oh dear oh dear. Like many, I had just assumed, in my arrogance, that
viruses weren't around these days and if they were, Virus Checker would stop
them dead. I break out in a sweat just thinking about the consequences if
the disk had of been mastered seriously virus infected. Apparently the virus
isn't perfect at linking so the cure can actually damage the files. I only
found a few damaged files. I live in fear that there's more I missed.
Damaged files, not virii. I went through it with a fine toothed comb on that
score though of course there's a danger of the files in the PD archives
being infected. Running VirusZ before accessing these might pay dividends.

Things got tidied up. Our little WWW pages grew the points of view page.
Amiga Technologies gave permition to use their WWW site but never got back
to me with the actual archive. :-/ <sigh> Breathless 1.1 engine demo finally
arrived complete with updater for the full game etc. Thanks to Adam from
Power for hassling Feilds of Vision over that.

Dice C Demo went on the CD. AFS HD demo and the full AFS floppy in the
floppy drawer. Made the CD mount AF0: as an AFS floppy drive if it boots.
Lord knows when you guys see AFS, you'll never use FFS floppies again, I
certainly don't in the office. Tony provided a tasty Octomed executable mod
that plays out via MIDI some accompanying general MIDI. Shame we haven't got
the gear to check it out. In the Modules directory root.

Alan wanted Harrys Balloons on the CD. I relented and threw it on though...
It's rather poor I'm afraid. Then again that's just my opinion. Oops! Just
realised I left the drawer name as 'Errr Sorry' when I sent it to Almathera.
:-) Got the init Icon (which sucks) sorted to drive the init script. Last
minute changes involved the huge Zeus BBS demo like being able to choose NOT
to install massive ammounts of BBS doors etc.

*Uplifting note;

Hard drive stuck in a parcel and couriered to Almathera. A weight has lifted
from my shoulders. I'm confident it's the best Amiga CD I've ever seen
before though this is largely because of the generosity of PD houses and
commercial companies supplying the goods. Of course the greatest part is by
all the PD/Shareware authors who's material is on the CD. I sincerely hope
this sort of thing will urge the Amiga community towards CD-ROMs as a
standard and that everyone will see Shareware as worthy of their cash where
previously they set it aside for commercial software and hardware.

With that, I draw this 'diary' to a close. Lots wasn't mentioned but there's
too much here as it was. All I have to do is write up a few things for the
magazine and I think I'll take a week off to recover.

Final note; Thanks to Steev at Almathera who was so prompt and efficient at
sorting out the last bugs, it made the final process of getting the actual
gear onto actual frisby much smoother than I thought it would be.

Since this was a woes file, I should tell you folks that I stuffed up. Using
AFS as the HD imagine, I completely forgot that it doesn't even have one
block 512 byte blocks minimums... Oh no. It has nice 'n chunky 2K blocks. 30
odd MB of ScreamTracker mods had to be chopped off due to this. Testing the
GoldDisk; My my, checking out the Gold, I thought it would trash around and
give slow dirs like most other CDs. It's quite nippy. Well done Almathera.

This is Mat signing off for CU Amiga Magazine CD edition.

P.S. I could write this much again remembering all the tiny things that were
supposed to go on or be modified on the CD. A word of warning, if you're a
perfectionist, NEVER try to compile a CD. It'll break your heart.

P.P.S. That's it. I think I deserve a holiday. Greece sounds nice. Bye.

Catcha,
     _ ___
/\/\(-) |  @ cu-amiga.demon.co.uk