Re: Golden Orchard v. AUGE CD

[Bill North <north@spso.gsfc.nasa.gov>]

In article <digisoft-2304951830140001@zallen.stanford.edu>
Jim Maricondo, digisoft@hypermall.com writes:

>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.

Apple has been particularly unhelpful in the area of Mac hard disk
and CD formatting/partitioning/mounting. The point to be made
(if there was one) was that the GO paper readme seemed to imply
that there was more than one Mac package to mount all the
partitions, not just FWB. I have the only other package I know
of (Insignia's RapidCD) and it doesn't mount all the partitions.
So get FWB, not RapidCD. This is obviously not GO's fault.

It would be interesting to know more about the HFS FST bug. Could
this account for GS+'s comment on the AUGE CD about "once in a blue
moon encountering a corrupted archive"?

>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.

I absolutely agree with this philosophy. On the other hand, I don't
remember any posts saying "we have XX MB still free on GO, here's a
catalog of what's on it, anyone want to contribute other stuff."
Without in any way minimizing the achievement of actually creating
and publishing GO, the future opportunities for additional CDs may
be limited. I may be surprised, perhaps in five years a wave of
nostalgia will coincide with cheap technology and we'll be flooded
with classic Apple 2 collections. I'm not betting on it.

I just see all the stuff I've archived on Syquests and (dying)
floppies that are not on either the AUGE and GO, and wish I had
a safe copy on CD.

>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.

The 'perfect' Apple 2 CD will probably never exist. The point made in
another post about the amount of poor CDs for MsDos is absolutely right.
There's a lot of junk out there. It also is very time consuming to create
a CD in a 'perfect' manner. It would still be nice to have an index.
Maybe a third party will generate one. :)

>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.

I hope my original comments did not seem too negative. The GO CD is a
tremendous achievement and asset. I'm not displeased at all that I bought
one. It has far more good points than negatives, but analyses tend to
be delta's from perfection, not delta's from zero. If I had started typing
a post listing all the 'standard good points' GO has that many other CDs
are supposed to include, but don't, I would still be typing.

Anyone who is serious about having safe copies of a vast quantity of
Apple 2 lore should have a copy.