Welcome to the May Macworld CD-Rom, packed with over 600Mb of the best Mac software you can get, including the best 50 Shareware games ever written, over half an hour of digital movies, the complete set of working demos from Claris, a demo of Marathon, the new game that does for the Mac what Doom did for the PC, several demos of morphing and special effects programs, dazzling interactive music videos, more examples of Quay 2's multimedia tutorials, over 20 new Mod music files, 12 powerful Shareware utilities, and much, much more.
This month there are two versions of the front end on the CD-Rom, a 'Lite' and a 'Full' version. They are both identical to each other except that the Lite version only asks for 3Mb of Ram to run in. This means that if you have a Mac with between 4Mb and 8Mb of Ram, you should run the 'Lite' version by default, as there should be sufficient available Ram to run both the front end, and most of the programs it calls up when you click on them.
However, you may find that using the 'Lite' version, one or two of the videos will not play back the sound on ANY Mac, as there may not be enough memory available. In which case you should try running the 'Full' version for these particular videos, which should solve the problem. If not, we have supplied a copy of Fast Player in the System folder of this CD-Rom. You can call it up from the desktop to play many videos that otherwise don't play correctly. There are two videos in the Movies folder, and many other spaced out across the CD.
If you have 8Mb or more of Ram on your Mac you should run the 'Full' version of the front end as it will provide plenty of Ram to both video and audio functions, as well as to external programs when you call them up. However, if any of the programs fail to run or return an error -108 then you should return to the desktop and run them from there, where they should all run correctly.
Before you start using this disc, please read the following important notes:
ABOUT RAM DOUBLER
Ram Doubler will definitely help you run more programs from the front menu. However, you must be aware that Ram Doubler will slow down your Mac, so some applications may appear a little sluggish, while audio or video tracks may break up. If so, when playing any audio or video, or running programs that are just too slow otherwise, you may prefer to switch Ram Doubler off.
ABOUT VIRTUAL MEMORY
Using the Mac's standard virtual memory facility will help you get more programs to run from the Macworld CD-Rom front menu, but not as many as Ram Doubler. You are also almost certain to experience breakup of sound and music when virtual memory is disabled. If you have to use virtual memory to get certain software to run, and you later wish to view the videos or play the music, you may prefer to disable it first.
A FINAL HINT
To give it the maximum amount of Ram to work with we recommend that you quit ALL open applications and disable unused (or non-essential) system extensions before running the front end.
We hope you enjoy using this issue of the CD-Rom. and look forward to seeing you again next month.
Robin Nixon,
CD-Rom Editor.
P.S. The copy of the Rebel Assault demo we recently published would not run correctly due to a mastering error. Sorry about that, but you will find it repeated on this CD-Rom in fully working order, in the Rebel Assault folder. Because this game needs loads of system resources we have not created a button to run it from the front end, instead you will need to run it from the desktop, by double clicking on the Rebel Assault alias that appears on the desktop when you open up the Macworld CD-Rom.
And don't forget that the CompuServe Information Manager can be installed by running the program 'CompuServe Installer' folder of this CD-Rom. It will then proceed to create a 'CompuServe' folder on your Mac's hard disk.
