REVIEW: Meeting Pearls III CD-ROM

by: Jason Compton


Review: Meeting Pearls III by Christian Gottschling

The bank slip is back!

Andrea Schmidt and friends decided one day it would be a good idea to put together a low-cost CD-ROM full of good, useful, and new freely redistributable Amiga software, sell it, and encourage people to send in donations if they liked it, making it more convenient by including a direct bank transfer slip in the CD case. Sharecompilation, it was called.

That worked well enough that they decided to do it again.

That worked even better, so they've done it yet again and are already planning a fourth Meeting Pearls CD party.

650 megs is a lot of stuff. So, what do you get?

You get a more friendly and helpful installer than I remember in the past. MP I, in particular, was a bit overly insistent on proper assigns and installation. However, Achtung!--when using Novice mode, it defaults to German if it sees a CD-ROM filesystem it doesn't like (the OS 3.1 version, for example)

You also get an AmigaGuide interface for browsing the CD-ROM. Sound familiar? Well, yes and no...it's not a clone of the Aminet interface, it actually allows you to configure virtually all of your preferences (viewers, MetaTool use, etc.) through AmigaGuide. Some very clever scripting is going on here...

The FindPearls utility is comprehensive, allowing more 'attractive' searching than plowing through a directory utility or using the AmigaGuide interface. It comes in handy if you're not up for a marathon session of exploring the CD.

Also of note is the special CD-Write demo included. The version included will allow you to CD-Write only to the MP III CD, but will give you an idea of the workings of the program and of course try to convince you that you can't live without it.

Pictures and text from the meeting itself are included, along with bios on many of the Meeting Pearls admins, for those who really want to see Angela Schmidt on a unicycle.

But there really are more useful items on the CD than that. Although it's not necessarily everyone's cup of tea, PasTeX 1.4, all 96 megs or so of it, is included on the disc. At the other end of the horizon, the game selection is pretty small but largely consists of the best available in free redistribution.

Some HTML documents are included, driven by an AMosaic 2.0 frontend. Roughly 10% of the CD's archives are text files of some kind, including Amiga Reports 3.01 through 3.18 with an included text search tool. Picking up one of these for the search tool alone is a good idea--more than once, I've searched through a tool such as this one to find out 'just when did we do that review, anyway?'

AmiTCP 4.0 and a selection of useful tools and add-ons are provided for the network-minded. My heart skipped a beat when I saw what appeared to be a registered version of Holger Kruse's PPP driver, but it requires a keyfile which, obviously, is NOT included.

If you're curious, a fan, or have discovered the bizarre phenomenon known as Baconizing (attempting to trace actors and their film appearances back to Kevin Bacon), you'll be interested in the complete Internet Movie Database.

The disc overall seems very application, development, and text oriented, but a respectable amount of music and pictures and the aforementioned games are provided for variety's sake.

The layout of the 'good stuff' is roughly the same as the Aminet structure, of short, easily recognizable subdirectories. There may not be a lot of love lost between the Meeting Pearls and Aminet camps, but at least there is some sort of agreement on logical structure. There are only so many ways to call a 'game' directory a 'game' directory...

In all, MP III is quite professionally put together, with a lot of attention given to providing an eclectic blend of Amiga software, even if the fun stuff does give a little way to the likes of the mammoth PasTeX. The Pearlers have come a long way since the first disc, and I wish them continued success.

The bottom line on this CD is that for the suggested price of US$12 (15 DM), it's really, really hard to say no, unless your CD-ROM tower is overflowing.

Schatztruhe


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