Another CD positively bulging with goodies, well not actually bulging of course, they have to be quite thin otherwise they won't fit in the drive, but take it from me youæd be hard pushed to fit any more on it with the measly meg or two that's left over this month.
This month we've compiled the very best in digital violence with a fair chunk of senseless carnage thrown in. But hey they're only aliens or evil looking brutes that probably deserve a good pasting anyway and you're the one that's going to teach them a lesson. Alternatively you're going to get the living daylights kicked out of you but at least it doesn't hurt. Good job really cos Rob would probably need fairly extensive plastic surgery (he does anyway) and a set of dentures judging by his performance with FX Fighter.
And just think it could be the beginnings of a new career, this month you're beating some weird looking digital squirt to a pulp, next month Frank Bruno, well OK maybe not. Anyway gear yourself up for a knuckle-sandwich, or two, with extra knuckles and a side serving of bruises.
If bare-knuckle brawling isn't your thing there's plenty of guns and assorted artillery to choose from so get those guns blazing and turn your screen into a one-stop, gore ridden, slaughter fest. There are absolutely bags of bad guys queueing up to take part in your very own personal blood-bath and you're the star. You'll stand heroically atop a pile of your foes corpses or end up with so many holes in you that you'll have no problems impersonating a swiss cheese. Either way it'll be an action packed, bullet riddled, grenade strewn massacre.
The interface has been brightened up a bit and as well as all the normal bits you'll find a hit list with all the best games on so you can fire them up straight away without waiting around for all those pretty pics to sort themselves out. Just type CDPP10 to start the disc up and as usual you'll need a mouse and enough ram to give smartdrive a bit of elbow room. The die-hard DOS heads amongst you can always just trawl around the disc, all the games live in sensibly named directories. A few won't run from the CD but can be installed onto your system and run from there. Sorry but we needed the space.
We're facing another yawning 666Mb of empty space that's going to be next months disc so we're off to the pub to look for some inspiration about what to put on it. Suggestions can be sent to us here, not that we'll necessarily read them of course we'll probably feed them to to one of the staff writers assuming they're small enough to get between the bars of his cage.
So stop wasting your time reading this. Get going and bust some noses. Remember take no prisoners, show no mercy and all that other gung-ho type stuff. See you next month
The content's of the CD in full glorious colour.
List of Contents
Lots of pretty grabs here including
Alien Carnage (looks a bit like Rob the day after we go to press)
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Techie Bit
The demos are tested to destruction in the office, the system spec is shown below. If your sound card/memory isn't configure the same you may experience all sorts of problems, lucky you. Sound card woes can be resolved by installing the game to your hard drive and running the sound setup routine, usually by typing SETUP or SOUNDSET instead of running the game. The games are tested on a machine that has about 570k Conventional Memory free after loading the CD, Mouse and Sound Drivers. You can check how much your system has available by typing MEM at the DOS prompt, the C:/> thingy. A piece about the ins and outs of jiggling memory to get more free would alas fill the mag so if you experience try running Memmaker by rebooting your system, typing MEMMAKER and following the instructions. failing that buy a good DOS book and spend the next four weeks reading it. If you understand more than half of it you could always apply for a job as a CD Rom Editor. Any games that are greedy enough to want more are highlighted. I'd recommend installing them to your hard drive and turning everything off including your CD Rom drivers if they need much more than 600k free.
The interface and several of the games expect you to have a mouse plugged in, no not a moose the antlers get in the way, and not one of the small fluffy white things that go squeak when you stand on them. You want one of the clicky plastic things that plugs into the back of your PC. You'll need a DOS driver loaded otherwise the interface will throw a fit. You can check this by typing MOUSE at your DOS prompt, a Bad command or filename error means that either you haven't got one or it's hiding somewhere on your hard disk where DOS can't see it. Try looking around for a file called MOUSE.COM and move it into your DOS directory or dig out your Windows installation disks. One of these disks has a mouse driver on it hiding under the pseudonym of MOUSE.CO_. You can install it it by placing the relevant disk in your floppy drive and typing:
EXPAND A:\MOUSE.CO_ C:\DOS\MOUSE.COM
The next time you type MOUSE you'll hopefully get an infinitely more useful Driver Installed message.
Slow, Slow, Quick, Quick, Slow.
The interface will crawl along unless you allocate a fair old slice of your upper memory to smartdrive which is a terribly clever bit of go faster software from Microsoft. It'll turn your CD drive from a Reliant Robin into a Porsche 944 in the blink of an eye. To use it just add the following line to your AUTOEXEC.BAT:
LOADHIGH C:\DOS\SMARTDRV.EXE /X 512 512
The numbers and other bits are just some standard settings if you end up short of memory try dropping both numbers to 256 or even 128. You'll need to re-boot after you've changed your AUTOEXEC.BAT to get smart drive up and running. After that the CD should just be a blur.
The system:
Sound Blaster 16 at port 220 with IRQ 5 8 bit DMA 1 and the 16 bit DMA 5. The system has 8Mb with about 570k of conventional memory free after all the device drivers are in. The system has a VESA compatible Diamond Stealth Video card for all those FMV (Full Motion Video) bits and the Windows stuff is tested on 3.11, if you use 95 on your own head be it.
