Review: Aminet 11 CD-ROM

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                         Review: Aminet 11 CD-ROM
                             By:  Jason Compton 
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Recently, Aminet CD-ROMs have included old versions of commercial software,
much like a magazine coverdisk.  In general, the offerings have been of
reasonable quality without being stunning additions to the CD-ROM.
However, this time around I am extremely impressed with the included
program.

XiPaint 3.2, the 24-bit paint program that is ECS, AGA, and virtually
all-graphic card format compatible, is included in its full form on the
Aminet CD-ROM.  Nice!

For those of you unaware, XiPaint is the standard Retina pack-in software.
It is an extremely capable package compatible with virtually all computers,
allowing you to paint even in HAM6 and HAM8.  XiPaint 4.0 has just been
released, and should do quite well considering the exposure 3.2 is
receiving on this CD-ROM.

But then, you don't buy Aminet CDs for the commercial software, right?  You
want those hundreds of megs of FD software.

This time around, the theme is maps--a bit odd, but at least there are a
lot of them.

The quality is the same--actually, it's been getting better the past couple
of discs--that I've come to expect from Urban and crew.  I even found a
good mod with a minimal amount of effort (Abacab, thanks Dr. Awesome!).

While there are an awful lot of mods and demos this time around, the
categorization of the demos continues to get more helpful.  The CD will
even help you keep track of which demos you've already viewed to date.

Amiga Report made it to the "recommendations" list of software, so I have
little to complain about in that arena.

It's really getting embarrasing not being able to come up with anything
novel to say about Aminet CDs.  They are the standard for freely
redistributable compilations of Amiga software, from one of the world's
largest collections of online software.  (Second largest next to the Linux
archive in binary size, apparently.)  If these guys start doing something
wrong, I'll let you know, but until then, keep watching the compilations...

Published by:

Stefan Ossowski's Schatztruhe
Veronikastr. 33
D-45131 Essen
Germany

++49 201 788778 phone
++49 201 798447 fax

stefano@tchest.e.eunet.de e-mail
http://www.schatztruhe.de/

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