EMedia Professional - The Editor's Spin, March 1997

It Is to Wonder

David R. Guenette

EMedia Professional, March 1997
Copyright © Online Inc.

Each year around Christmas, I become a mortal. My editor's mantle is laid aside, and I become just another regular joe. I'm speaking, of course, about trying out new CD-ROM titles as a consumer.

First of all, let me make clear right up front that there's nothing old, funky, or otherwise to blame with my computer platform at home, outside of what still ails any personal computer these days. I'm running Windows 95, there's 16MB in the box, the Cyrix processor is rated as a Pentium 166MHz equivalent, the motherboard is the well-established latest Biostar Triton II HX. The graphics card is an Integrated Micro Solutions Twin-Turbo 128 PCI with 2MB, and there is a Bus Logic PCI Fast SCSI card that is a dream. Since the system is an upgrade there are some old parts, like two too-small (by current standards) hard drives, a Media Vision Pro Audio Spectrum 16 sound card, and a Chinon 2X internal CD-ROM drive that connects to the SCSI card, plus what is now a three-generation past NEC multichanger that holds seven discs and which pulls data off at little better than 350KB/sec, despite the 4X claims. Windows 95 operates okay, the legacy sound card came up under Plug and Play, and both the graphics card and the SCSI adapter installed perfectly, with Bus Logic's drivers even handling the old NEC multichanger transparently.

And then I get to the titles themselves. Now I know that there are a lot of rules listed and guides to good practice set out for multimedia developers, available in print, online, and even showing up in picket lines. Why then do so many CD-ROM publishers fail to heed these practices? After all, publishers have obvious motivation to produce well-behaved discs, since the consumer CD-ROM title market is universally considered to be both highly competitive and long suffering, and who would think anyone wants any poor title performance and design that could hurt public perception? Add to these situations the fact a number of the guilty parties are big companies with, one may presume, ample resources to undertake quality assurance and hire and train talent, and one must wonder just how wise Homo Sapiens are, after all. Look at some title publishing going on today and you have to start thinking about a species name change for us. Homo semi-Sapiens, anyone?

Here's a terrifying example: Microsoft Corporation is distributing, free of charge, through computer stores and bundles and who knows how else, a Windows 95 games and multimedia titles demo disc. The point of the disc, I assume, is to sell people on Windows 95 and on the Microsoft Windows 95 CD-ROM titles and games.

Unfortunately, that sales effort gets a little compromised, shall we say, by the aforementioned disc's performance. For example, the Microsoft demo for Close Combat (one of about 30 titles supplied) installed impolitely even before it made the system go AWOL; the demo didn't sufficiently poll the system nor allow the user to exit with an uninstall option from a mid-install exit. Another sin: the demo didn't give me an option to address video settings, but instead rather brutishly assumed I wouldn't mind if it reset video parameters.

I knew better, and wanted to throw this enemy within out on its ear, but foolishly I forged ahead in the hopes that at the end an uninstall option would appear, as sometimes is the case. Instead, my video driver was overwritten as the demo tried to reset color depth after resetting resolution, even though the color depth was as requested. The result was that the graphics card was driven by the wrong software, which gave me video junk in three-quarters of the screen, with the Display Settings control panel showing up in the top horizontal quarter of the monitor, duplicated in miniature four times. The repeating images were too tiny to act on, especially since mouse movements erased them. It was close combat indeed: Press F5 for Safe Mode Start Up and do not collect $200.

I can certainly see where the JAVA and HTML people are coming from: write to virtual machines that live and die on their own without leaving a stinking corpse, or to common interfaces and browser environments to play it safe. The PC multimedia platform--and the Mac is no exception--is really a kludge upon kludge, and there are a lot of legacy problems to avoid. It is a challenge, but still it can be done, as many titles successfully installed have shown. All it takes is work.

Which is what surprises me when titles go bad, especially when Microsoft is in command. I mean, Bill Gates is as rich as God, and his company could afford to be more careful, especially with discs whose whole purpose is to entice the user with the wonderful performance and ease of use of Windows 95.

Maybe I expect too much. Maybe God doesn't really do any better. Apparently, there are parts of our genes called introns that are DNA fragments left over from when we were lizards, or amoebas, or leaves, and only entrons, the active parts of genes, are expressed in our current form of primate biped capable of some sort of thought. If God Himself writes fat code and kludgeware, perhaps we should be patient with Bill Gates' multimedia.

But then, Bill Gates has a market to woo, it seems to me, while the Good Lord leaves us to our own devices.

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