Re: Golden Orchard v. AUGE CD

[digisoft@hypermall.com (Jim Maricondo)]

In article <3n490j$34m@post.gsfc.nasa.gov>, Bill North
<north@spso.gsfc.nasa.gov> wrote:

> My first impression is that there is surprisingly little
> duplication. This impression is a gut feeling, not an
> indepth analysis, that does _not_ include the fonts, music,
> or graphics directories. On the other hand, there is a
> surprisingly large amount of duplication just on the Golden
> Orchard: the entire prodos partition contents seems to
> be duplicated on GO-Main or some other HFS partition.
> 
> Random additional thoughts on Golden Orchard:
> 

> 4. All partitions mount on the GS, but the Mac is a problem.
> As stated in the included 'read.me' paper, the Apple cd driver
> only mounts one partition (GO-Main). To mount the others
> require a third party driver. FWB CD Toolkit is specifically
> mentioned. I have Insignia's RapidCd, and _IT Doesn't WORK_.
> Bummer.

There was nothing we could do about that.  The GS's HFS FST was too buggy
to make the CD one large HFS volume (and that also would have cost us an
extra ~100mb in HFS overhead, so we'd be able to put like 100mb less on
the CD).  And Apple's Mac CD-ROM drivers are brain-dead when it comes to
multiple partitions.  Both the driver's and the FST's limitations are out
of our control.  If you want to access all the partitions on your mac, get
FWB CD-ROM Toolkit.  Or complain to Apple to make their drivers better.

> 5. The choice of which GS system software versions to include
> is at times curious. Why include 3.1 but not 3.2? <shrug>

We put what we could find.

> 6. The aforementioned duplication of the GO.PRODOS partition
> "wastes" 15MB for little apparent gain.

The apparent gain here is usability on a IIe, or under ProDOS 8.  15mb is
only about two percent of the CD's contents, so it's a very small
sacrifice in our opinion.

> 7b. Golden Orchard is very nicely organized. But the lack of any
> kind of index at all is rather annoying. To discover if what you
> are looking for is on the CD you have to mount it and paw through
> the directories. Since my CD is usually attached to my Mac (and
> Appleshared to the GS) this is extremely awkward (remember my
> Mac won't mount all the partitions). This is the biggest
> disappointment of the CD. Yes, I've run a recursive directory
> listing to a text file, but an index is more than a file list
> dump.

A full catalog is available on our web site (the address is in my
signature.)  A full index with descriptions would be ideal but also
somewhat impractical.

> 10. Obviously each person will be attracted to what they are
> interested in. I felt the 128MB used for GO-G.S. (containing
> most of the graphics and sounds) could have been more profitably
> filled with 'GS' stuff rather than GIFS and MODS and etc. But
> you may be thrilled to see all the graphics and sounds.

One thing a lot of people don't realize is that making a CD is a huge
task.  It's not easy to accumulate, sort, and test 600 megabytes of files
to put on one.  We tried our best to cram in as much as possible without
going insane.  It
took over a year to make Golden Orchard and like any project, we could
have kept adding, testing, organizing, and revising files forever, but we
wanted to get it released.  The value of a CD such as this lies partly in
its availability.  If we were to spend yet another year on the CD before
releasing it, it would only see a smaller market and a higher price tag.

One thing we did feel was important though was using the capacity of a
Compact Disc.  I'm not trying at all to knock AUGE, but we could not stand
to see the majority of a CD's storage capacity being unused.  I think it's
better to have 128MB of music and art than 128MB of wasted empty space.

> Conclusion? Both the AUGE and Golden Orchard CDs are worth getting
> for different reasons and contents. Both are inconvenient in their
> own unique ways. I am glad to have both, but the definitive Apple
> IIgs CD is yet to be created. There is still room for another.

I would love to see someone make the perfect CD, fully organized and
indexed, with descriptions and information about every file it contained,
easily searchable, with the latest versions of everything, and with
everything there is available.  That would be great.  However, as much as
I would like to see it, I don't think it will ever happen.  Why?  Try it,
and see how long (time and energy) it would take to finish.

If this is a good success and we get enough interest, we would consider
doing more CDs in the future.  I have about 100-200mb of compressed Apple
II files from America Online for instance that I haven't decided what to
do with.  Or we could do a CD with something like only MODs...

I hope this doesn't sound too argumentative or negative.  I just wanted to
share some of the great effort that goes into putting together as much
data as is on Golden Orchard.

 <<Jim
-- 
Jim Maricondo        | digisoft@hypermall.com
DigiSoft Innovations | http://hypermall.com/cgi-bin/ssis/digisoft/digisoft/
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