CU Amiga Super CD-ROM 27/CU Amiga Magazine's Super CD-ROM 27 (1998)(EMAP Images)(GB)[!][issue 1998-10].iso/neil.readme

Text File | 1998-08-26 | 6KB | 128 lines

Thursday 13th August

Gutted is an understatement, I've just go off the phone to Tony
Horgan, this is the last CUCD, the last CU Amiga. At the moment I just
feel numb, all those plans for future CDs, all the improvements and
additions I wanted to include, none of them mean anything now.


Much later

I had planned to write a bit more each day, but didn't feel like it...
Now the CD is almost finished, most of the work is done and I'm just
waiting for a few odds and sods from the latecomers (you know who i
mean Andrew).

It's very strange doing this CD, knowing it's the last one. There's so
much we wanted to include and only 640MB of space. A lot of people have
been asking whether I can include their contribution on the final CD
and most will be disappointed. I have made 23 other CDs with Readers
drawers. but suddenly everyone is interested in having their creations
included, but it's too late for them, just as it's too late for some
of my plans.

I'd just finished the first version of a new CD search tool, that
searches the index files of the CU Amiga and Aminet CDs. I was about
to add the facility to keep the index files on hard drive, for much
faster searching, with automatic updating from InitCD. Ah well.

Conflicting motivation has been the main problem with this CD. On the
one hand I want to make the final CD as good as possible and go out
with a bang, but then I think about it being the last and what's been
lost, get depressed and can't be bothered. Fortunately the former won
most times, but it's meant some late nights making up for time lost to
the periods of apathy.

This CD is absolutely full, I was working until after midnight last
night, trying to make space for yet more stuff. I found that many of
the example renders with Cinema4D were in tiff format, converting them
to JPEGs freed up over 30MB. Don't you just love AmigaDOS, one line in
a shell converted all the TIFFs to JPEG, deleted the original TIFF
files and renamed the icons from xxx.tif.info to xxx.jpg.info.
NetPBM, List lformat and pipes really rock.

This is the 27th CUCD, and the 24th I've worked on. That's exactly two
years, and so much has happened in that time it's hard to remember
what it was like before. It all started with a newsgroup posting from
Mat Bettinson. CU Amiga had decided to have a monthly cover CD and
needed someone to compile it on a freelance basis. I replied, we
exchanged a few emails, met for a pub lunch and the deed was done.

The first few CDs were a real learning experience, most of them were
created on my old Amiga 2000, which only had a slow 68030 at the time.
I bought an 040 card within a month, handling hundreds of megabytes of
LhA archives with an 030/25 was just too slow. The first few CDs were
built on my hard drive, I then copied the drive to a pile of Zip disks
and posted them to Mat. He put them onto his hard drive image, added
some extras, he usually handled the main cover mounts, and burnt a
gold CD (or several since the first ones rarely work properly).

There were a lot of teething troubles, we were learning all the way.
The idea of me working independently, a couple of hundred miles from
CU's office, worked well most of the time, but there were a few
glitches caused by the two of us working more or less independently.
But we survived and learnt.

After a few months I bought my own CD writer (just before prices
started to plummet, the story of my life). This made things quite a lot
easier, I could send Mat a tested, working CD, ready for him to add
his stuff and remaster.

When Mat left CU Amiga, I took over the complete process, a natural
progression really. An 060 card with lots of memory soon followed,
then a new, 4X, CD writer. This meant I could master a complete CD in
less than 20 minutes, compared with over an hour for the previous
setup. This was partly dues to the faster writer, a lot due to the
faster processor and greatly helped by the fast SCSI controller of the
060 card. I could no burn a CD on the fly without an intermediate
image file, although it needed a very large memory buffer to avoid
destroying CDs, I ended up using 64MB for safety.

The A2000 was eventually put out to pasture when it became clear that
the 2604 PowerPPC card would never see the light of day, and an A4000
arrived. This was brought into service the night before WOA, many of
you will have seen be cursing and threatening it on the CU Amiga
stand, but at least it had a PowerPC in it. I've tamed the beast since
WOA, one of the main problems was the heat in the exhibition hall,
when it got too hot it sulked and refused to boot up.

The nitty gritty of making the CDs hasn't changed that much. Each
morning I receive an email from Aminet listing the latest uploads,
from which I select likely looking archives. Other sources are various
web pages and direct contact from software authors. for the first
couple of weeks I only collect the archives, then the serious work
starts, unarchiving, installing, checking documentation and a lot more
besides. Just snapshotting all the icons and drawers for the CD takes
a long time. Originally I spent a full two days on this task alone,
but thanks to the wonders of arexx and Directory Opus Magellan, this
has reduced to about half that.

There is plenty of discussion of the CD on the CU Amiga mailing list,
which leads to some changes to the CD just about every month. The
feedback from the list and other sources is so useful. Knowing what
people like and dislike, and bing able to discuss alternatives helps
make the CDs what they have become.




Aaargh! An hour to go and a demo of Putty Squad has just arrived, and
it crashes every time I try to run it. I expect I'll just have to dump
the DMS on the CD in the hope we can find a way to make it work before
the CD pages of the magazine are finished tomorrow lunchtime.

Why should this one be easy when none of the other 23 were...



I shall always be here...

Neil
--
Neil Bothwick - CU Amiga CD Compiler & Webmaster
mailto:[e-mail] - http://www.cu-amiga.co.uk