## Review: Aminet 6 CD-ROM

### By: Jason Compton

With the recent decision to move the Aminet CDs to a bimonthly (rather than quarterly) format, it's going to be difficult to keep up. Apparently, they're really doing that well, and Aminet's usage is at its highest. Great, I say.

Aminet 6's "headline" items include the entire collection of demos (many, surprisingly enough, will run straight from CD, although you know those wacky demo programmers, you may not be able to exit, or if you can, you may wish you hadn't as a guru sneaks up on you and mightily crashes your system when you least expect it), 520 megs of new material, and an authorized collection of the entire Amiga Report archives up to and including AR 3.08 and the Auction issue.

The familiar AmigaGuide interface is back (where would it possibly go?), again, as always, in English and German, with a quick search utility and the ability to run and view most items directly from CD with your favorite utility using the prefs feature of the CD. (Obviously, the prefs aren't saved directly to the CD, but you can save them for future reference.)

The collection of mods on this CD is enough to keep you busy enough, and the "shuffle" button is a nice touch. Pity it doesn't continually shuffle, though. A word of advice-Ignore Urban's ratings of the mods. While I usually don't disagree with his choices for terrible ratings (which are fairly rare), he gives some high marks to some mediocre tunes. To each his own...

The Amiga Report collection comes with something even I didn't have before this-an article search utility, which lets you search all AmigaGuide issues (1.14 onward) for a text string. I LOVE this. I'm constantly checking back issues to help people with questions I KNOW I saw answered last summer, or to find a phone number from a company I KNOW was in one of the first issues this year, or...etc. Sorry about not being able to search the earliest issues. I'm not even sure what the reasons were that made this impossible, but it's not like you're missing too much. They're nice to have around, though, if for no other reason than to see how Amiga Report has evolved.

Aminet still holds a price of 25 DM, but authors of software that appears on Aminet can contact Urban Mueller for a free CD. Subscription deals are also available from Aminet CD distributors.

What else can be said? Aminet continues to be the premier source for redistributable software. While nothing beats the speed of your local mirror site, it's sometimes nice to have the goods available at your convenience, limited only by the speed of your CD-ROM drive.

Published by:
Stefan Ossowski's Schatztruhe (you know, I can spell that from memory now.)
Veronikastr. 33
D-45131 Essen
Germany
+49-201-788778 phone
+49-201-798447 fax
stefano@tchest.e.eunet.de
North American distribution:
Amiga Library Services
602-917-0917 phone/fax
fnf@amigalib.com