REVIEW: AMINET 9 CD-ROM

by: Jason Compton


Review: Aminet 9 by Pauli Porkka

Aminet's Christmas release is out, and appropriately enough, Santa is on the cover.

I'm pretty sure it's just an image from somewhere rather than Urban Mueller in a big red suit.

Anyway, following closely on the heels of Aminet Set 2, Aminet 9 puts all of the archive's games on the CD-ROM, including 5 aging commercial titles that you're not supposed to give away.

Hey. Wait a second. This sounds awfully familiar...

Yes, released at just about the same time, Aminet 9 offers just about everything, except the 70 'special commercial' titles, from Gamers' Delight 2.

In addition to the ~190 or so megs of compressed games, Aminet 9 boasts a slew of material more recent than the 4-disc Aminet Set 2 (to be reviewed in AR 4.02, backwards though that may be) and a superset slew of stuff more recent than Aminet 8. Older chart-topping material is included as well to round out the disc to a comfortable 628 compressed megs.

The 'new since Aminet 8' category is not specially indexed, but the 'since Set 2' is. The former is explained as being because of the large amount of new material (except the game archive), but considering the number of 'top download' material included, a special index would have been nice to have for completists.

Nothing has changed much in the interface. AmigaGuide as ever with external prefs, you now get a lot of new mod file descriptions, only when viewed in their individual directory. Which is too bad, since the playlist is really convenient.

Speaking of mods, it seems that more than usual are on this particular CD, which is not necessarily an unwelcome feature--just unusual. In fact, as sheer space goes, the music directory far outweighs the other major directories-nearly 100 megs, while its closest competition, docs, trails at 75 megs. Most of the 75 megs in docs are the docs/etext directory, the Project Gutenberg archives.

The 5 commercial games on the disc are indeed from Gamers' Delight 2, and are fairly nondescript. You may have a good time in Jumpman for a while, but for me their inclusion was less interesting than the registered version of Delitracker Aminet disc owners got recently.

Some 50 megs of demos are included, categorized generally by what will and will not work on an A4000/040, which is a nice touch.

Unless you're IV'ed to the Aminet, it's tough to beat the convenience of having it for yourself on CD-ROM, and the price, which hovers around US$20, isn't bad at all for the ease of use and promptness of the material. Aminet 9 doesn't come with the best 'gifts', but then again I remember the days when it didn't come with any 'gifts' at all, and the CDs were still good.

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