Welcome to the CD Powerplay Beat-em and Blast-em Collection
At long last a revamped interface adorns this months superior selection.
The screens work in much the same way with the Next, Previous, Install and Run buttons doing all the obvious things, Back will take you to the last menu and the Esc key will eventually let you out.
The pages have been brightened up a bit and the graphics simplified to help speed things along and generally make things run a little smoother.
Using the menus couldn't be simpler, just click on the relevant text and away you go.
A new hit list option has been added. All our favourites are on it so you can get up and running without having to wade through four hundred screens worth of drivel beforehand.
If you experience any video problems there's a copy of the univesa support utility in the UNIVESA directory on the CD just type
UNIVESA\UNIVESA
at the D:\> prompt.
Any games that kick you straight back out when you try and run them from the interface are probably having memory problems. Memmaker should sort them out for you. Quit the CD menu and type:
MEMMAKER
at your DOS prompt.
Your machine will re-boot a couple of times and hopefully you'll discover oodles of memory that went astray and everyone will be smiling and happy.
A couple of the games run in Windows. These are designated by a small Windows logo. The interface will try and start Windows up to run the demo/game. If it fails miserably the path to the progran is usually included. The interface should still be lurking around once you've closed Windows down but no guarantees on that.
Any games that just lock up and die are probably trying to play with sound hardware that you haven't got. We test all the stuff in the office on using a Sound Blaster 16, yep the genuine article, no immitation. It's set to port 220, IRQ 5 , DMA 1 and DMA 5 if you need to change the settings cos your system is different there's usually a SETUP or SOUNDSET utility in the games directory.
The games each live in their own directory. In some cases two directories, one that installs the other that runs. All the dirs have pretty sensible names so navigating around shouldn't be a problem. Here's a short list of some other useful utilities that are lying around on the CD just in case you need any of them.
UNIVESA
A VESA support extension for older video cards
WING
A graphics extension for Windows
WIN32S
The 32 bit API for Windows
VFW11E
The latest version of Video for Windows
VFWEXT
A new extension for VFW needed by the Earthsiege 2 demo.
Anyway here's hoping that you don't need any of this. See you next month.