January 1997

  Windows 95

Guitar Teacher

Registration: $US25
URL: celista@netshop.net

Guitar Teacher is a Windows 95 game for studying and printing guitar-chord diagrams. You can quickly select and display each chord. The shareware program features save and print chord charts, support for Sound Blaster and other MIDI compatible audio cards and seven chord formulas, including major, major 7, minor, minor 7 and suspended 4.

Guitar Teacher also offers six alternatives for each chord -- a total of 504 chord diagrams, formula and voice displays, right- or left-handed fingering, a guitar tuner, and instruction on tuning and chord structure. Guitar Teacher is great value for students.

You can also download it from our School PC Web site at www.schoolpc.acp.com.au. It requires an IBM or compatible, Windows 95, VGA colour, MIDI compatible soundcard, 2.5Mb of hard disk space and a mouse.

by Alan Hilvert-Bruce

  Windows 3.1

 Bush Tucker Man

From: Natural Learning (02) 9894 0248
List price: $49
System requirements: 486DX4/100, Windows 95 or 3.1, 16Mb RAM, quad-speed CD-ROM drive, 32Kb colours
Overall value: 8/10

Take Bush Tucker Man for a spin and you can live vicariously off the land as you watch ABC TV's Les Hiddins reveal the secrets of gastronomic survival in the bush. Subtitled 'From Rainforest to Cape York', this slick disc also features about a dozen video tours of the greater Cape York peninsula. These narrated videos display smartly at quarter-screen size using the MPEG software supplied on the CD-ROM. Their focus shifts from the plane crash site at Moonlight Creek and Roaring Meg waterfall to the Iron Range region and the Arukun Aboriginal community.

About 50 narrated video clips, each targeting a different type of bush tucker, are plucked from these tours and attached to the smorgasbord of nearly 100 bushes, insects, roots and fish that fill Hiddins' bush tucker scrapbook.

Although the CD-ROM controls are cleverly camouflaged with nary a scrollbar in sight, the colours chosen for the distribution maps makes them almost impossible to read.

Dangerous Sea Creatures

From: Natural Learning (02) 9894 0248
List price: $49
System requirements: or 3.1, 16Mb 486DX4/100, Windows 95 RAM, quad-speed CD-ROM drive
Overall value: 6/10

If you're set for a holiday by the Australian seaside, don't go near the water until you've checked out this CD-ROM. The theme threading through Dangerous Sea Creatures is that few occupants of the ocean actively hunt humans, but we blunder into bother largely through our own ignorance.

Based largely on the personal experience of naturalist Neville Coleman, this disc profiles over 100 undersea infants terribles. They're catalogued as venomous, which embraces bluebottles, cone shells, stingrays, scorpionfish and sea ferns; poisonous, which includes pufferfish, ciguatera in large carnivorous fish and algal blooms siphoned up by shellfish; and dangerous, which includes sharks, crocodiles and morays.

Each entry comprises a stunning full-screen photo, a fact sheet and a folksy blurb that often includes anecdotes of Coleman's adventures. About one in five entries has a crisp quarter-screen video. Sadly, there's no distribution map and the 'location' listed for an entry only tells where the photo was taken.

Back issues:

December 1996 Education programs

November 1996 Education programs