CD-Title: Meeting Pearls Other review: Meeting Pearls 4
The fourth Meeting Pearls conference has been held, and this CD is the result. Founded a few years ago by Angela Schmidt, who was sick of expensive freely distributable software CDs, the Meeting Pearls series consists of CD-ROMs put together by a group of German Amiga users and software authors who come together to fill up a huge hard drive with the latest and best in freely distributable software, and then get it published for minimum cost (these days, 15DM or about US$10-$11). The catch is that if you like the CD, you're supposed to make a contribution to the group's efforts, made simple through the inclusion of a bank deposit slip. <Å> MP IV has come a long way from the first edition, which had an insistence on using a then somewhat obscure thing called 'MUI' and wasn't the easiest thing in the world to get set up. And while it still likes MUI and Metatool in great proportions, the interface and CD access is far easier than it used to be. <Å> All you need to do to get running is to go through a short assign-installation procedure, and then you're free to browse through an AmigaGuide interface (or the CD itself, of course, through more conventional means) to get what you're after. Or use the included FindPearls search utility. Or, better yet, you can search the documentation of just about all of the programs on the CD, which is a neat trick, and quite useful.
In general, the CD is bilingual (English/German) although if you use the Novice setting for the setup installation, you're not asked and it defaults to German. I find it's usually best never to use Novice mode for any reason, but be forewarned in this particular case. Sometimes links from an English document will lead to German versions of other documents, while a link elsewhere will garner you the English version you wanted.
If you were comfortable with earlier MP editions, or are a user of the Aminet Amigaguide interface, you'll have no problems with this one.
The Meeting Pearls CDs are a great idea and have a certain potential edge over Aminet CDs, which is that instead of just getting the newest titles of a given couple of months, you're getting the personal picks of the past several months of real people who come together with this specific goal in mind. It doesn't diminish the Aminet CDs, it's simply a different genre.
You could conceivably accuse the MP assemblers of having a 'utilities and tools' slant, as the Gaming directory is not huge, but the games that are on there are of the better quality available--once again, the personal choice outweighs the nature of 'recent quantity.'
One of the highlights is a pre-configured version of Ghostscript, which is actually somewhat operable by a human being. Ghostscript is a GNU-freely available PDF (Adobe Acrobat) format document reader, as well as a Postscript interpreter. The output quality I tested with the Infocom Masterpieces CD PDF manuals was not the greatest, but at least it didn't crash as all of my independent Ghostscript installation attempts have done. The configuration, however, is rather dependent on having the Meeting Pearls CD in the drive.
At the price, if you're looking for a good way to catch up on FD software, you can't beat Meeting Pearls IV.