Just So You Know
My CDTV output display is a Sony KV19TS20, a 1991 model 19" stereo color Trinitron television. I've hooked up CDTV with the "composite out" jack to the television's "video in" jack, and connected CDTV's audio into the Sony's stereo speakers through the twin audio jacks on the back of both devices. This gives me excellent video and acceptable (though by no means "hi fi") audio from CDTV. I mention this because you might see CDTV demoed on different kinds of displays or your own hookup might be different. I report 'em the way my eyes see 'em.
When talking about CDTV titles, I'll include some useful information about each disc: price, .info star rating, and whether or not it comes with its own disc caddy (my local dealer gets SI2.95 each for empty caddies).
So with the ground rules out of the way, let's take a look at a few early release titles. (Oh, and no games here. CDTV games will be covered in .info's CyberPlay section).
$79.95 Caddy supplied Applied Optical Media Corp.
World Vista _
A family-oriented world atlas on a disc, World Vista is a reference title that will probably nimiiii
L TIMED!A
by Harv Laser
- 0 1000 1900 1990
Xiphias' Timeline of Science and Innovation.
end up in the home of just about ail CDTV owners, along with an encyclopedia and/or dictionary, What sets this disc apart from your standard hook-type atlas is that as you explore the world, you can hear samples of countries' music and language, something no book can give you.
Like most CDTV references, you navigate World Vista down through layers of menus and submenus to reach your destination, but there arc "jump" points to get you to certain areas quickly. I expected the menu called "Tours" to take me on a guided tour of some country like a travelogue, but instead found that this button actually summoned a guide to World Vista itself: basically the title's manual on disc. Still, it proved useful for initial orientation.
World Vista is chock full'o maps as a good atlas should be. Continents, countries, regions, major cities, right down to some scroll-around highwaylevel maps scanned from an atlas, but there are no detailed street maps. Surprisingly. some major cities such as New York, Detroit, and Minneapolis, were missing from the U.S.A. city maps, while some smaller cities like Buffalo were there. Strange logic, and it led me to wonder if this title was rushed out before completion.
But while some maps arc absent, there's a ton of information and statistics on each country. If you're aching to know the life expectancy of women in Botswana, or what commodities are Poland's main imports, you'll find llllll + llll
Timeline of Science and Innovation
$59.95 No Caddy Xiphias iiiiii^iiii it here, along with similar info for every country in the world; there are even bar charts showing each nation's ranking in the world in many categories.
World Vista's interface graphics are nothing spectacular. They are mainly low-resolution, and lack a certain cohesiveness - as though different artists with different styles worked on different parts of it - but at least low-res means screens load quickly. Summary: not an exceptional title, but definitely useful.
Timeline of Science and Innovation
In a word, this title is spectacular. Timeline of Science and Innovation (there's a companion release covering Business, Politics & Media), is a remarkably well-crafted title that's so rich and deep with detail it's almost overwhelming. What can you say about a disc that covers a period of time from the Big Bang to the Hubble Telescope!? If all Xiphias CDTV titles are as great as this, they're going to be a name to remember.
ToSI is remarkably professional-looking - the best I've seen so far. High-resolution screens arc used throughout, and they display beautifully. The muted colors and crisp fonts make working with ToSI for hours a pleasure. Only the black overscan border area spoils perfection,
The hard facts of scientific discovery and invention are put in their proper frame of reference by the inclusion of dozens of important historical events along the timeline. The fact that a Benedictine monk developed musical notation in 1026 AD may be a yawn by itself. To know this happened while (he Crusades were going on (and then have the Crusades explained, on demand), or to hyper-link that word "notation" and find 157 other subjects which contain it. and then to explore them, shows how ToSI has perfectly embraced the concept of multimedia and hypertext. This disc just begs you to explore it.
ToSI contains many still-frame animations with digitized sounds, such as the Challenger explosion. The full Periodic Table of the Elements is here with details on each. A terrific "Powers of Ten" slideshow Ids you see how far off-Earth many events occurred. Economic influences are charted. A terrific Prehistoric Time Line is a major plus. And I've just scratched the surface. This one title really puts the entire history of science into perspective in a way you may have never seen it before. Summation: a real winner. A must have.
illustrated Works of Shakespeare
This title is unique of those I've sampled since it contains both CDTV and IBM-PC VGA versions. I didn't have a chance to try it on a PC, so I can't offer a comparison.
What we have here is every word the Bard of Avon ever wrote: all his plays, poems, and sonnets. This massive body is wrapped in a rather charming and decidedly British-looking user interface which you navigate by moving a small semi-animated human hand around the screen with your controller. An opening tutorial aids in learning how to use it. It was here I found the litle's major flaw - the tutorial's buttons and the hand were almost off the bottom of my TV's screen. I suspect this title was written with PAL screens in mind - annoying, though not impossible to use.
Slap the 'run' button and dive in. A strip of icons (Paragraph, Scene, Bookshelf, Pictures, Search. Font, etc) allows easy maneuvering through each of Shakespeare's works, while his texts are presented 011 a 2/3 screen "scroll" above. You can drop up to live bookmarks anywhere, should you wish to wander and come back. There's a search facility to find any paragraph with up to five search words in the book you're reading or the whole bookshelf of works. Here again, the computer inside CDTV shines: this is something you simply can't easily do on paper. But why doesn't Search mode have
WE'RE GOING TO MAKE YOU AN OFFER YOU CANT REFUSE!
TMand ©1991 Paramount Pictures. All rights reserved. The GODFATHER is a trademark of Paramount Pictures. U.S. Gold Authorised User.
an abort command? Argh. Don't misspell a search word or you're in for a long wait.
TlWnS's "pictures" which illustrate each book are grayscale scans of woodcuts - nicely atmospheric. For reading, many different fonts and sizes are available at the touch of a button - they're all stock WorkBcnch fonts and many were illegible on my television, so 1 stuck with the default. None were as clean as the fonts used in TimeTable of History. Again, lo-rcs has its drawbacks.
I expected some suitably Elizabethan background music and British-accent narration on this title, but was disappointed 10 find the only sounds on this disc were the button press and page-flip "beeps." The Bard won't read to you.
Summary: if you need all of Shakespeare's work 011 one CD for your classes or research, this will surely do.
$49.95 No Caddy Animated Pixels (Publishing) Ltd
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Illustrated Works of Shakespeare from Animated Pixels.
hut it could have a cleaner television display. On an RGB monitor it should be fine. The IBM-VGA version on the same disc is a definite plus, especially in a school or college situation where no CDTV is available.
Addresses
World Vista. Applied Optical Media Corporation. 18
Great Valley Parkway, Malvern. PA 19355 Timeline of Science and Innovation. Xiphias. I lelms Hall. 8758 Venice Boulevard. Los Angeles. CA 90034. 213-841-2790 Illustrated Works of Shakespeare. Animated Pixels (Publishing) Ltd.. Albermarle House. Osborne Road. Southsea, Hampshire P05 3LB. United Kingdom
About the author
Harv Laser is Sysop/Moderator of the Portal online system's new Amiga Zone. His Internet EMail address is harv@cup.portal.com
by Jamie Krutz elcome to the regular meeting of the Martian society of planetary anthropology. This month we have an earth topic from the mid-nineteen-eighties through the mid-nineties. We have, as a special guest, techno-historian Midi Smpte! Did I pronounce that right. Midi?"
"Uh. actually it's pronounced Mid'-ee Simp'tee. But my friends call me 'T.C.'"
"Yeah. It stands for 'Time Code'. See. there used to be a thing called SMPTE Time Code, and my grandfather..."
"The famous musician..."
"...suggested my name to my parents, with SMPTE for a last name instead of the four hyphenated last-names I would have had. And anyway, everyone just calls me T.C."
"Let's give a warm welcome to. Midi. ahem. Smpte, uh, Smpte T.C!"
"Thank you, all. I started my research early in life when I was being teased for not having a more normal name like 'Zsackt'or 'Neply'. 1 was a little sensitive, so I started looking into where my name came from. Luckily my mother had kept a lot of grandfather's stuff, so 1 had good resource material; and Earth resource material is hard to I'ind these days!"
1 yawned. It was another get-together of moldy historians. 1 looked around the room. Cute metallic right behind me! She glanced at me. The lecture faded into the background as our eyes locked in perfect synchronization. 1 could have drowned in those eyes! Such depth, such allure, such music!
Music?
There was music, an incredible combination of sounds; a tease, an emotion, a tension, and - whoa! - a resolution that 1 could feel all the way down to my knees.
1 forgot the woman and turned all attention back to the front of the hall. I'm sure she was doing the same.
T.C. stopped the music and continued. "My grandfather was able to create an incredible amount of music, using the tools that had just been invented. He had something called an Amiga, and using a Musical Instrument Digital Interface he could connect it to machines that could manipulate the very essence of sound. These machines were called synthesizers and samplers, and in those days such things were plentiful."
Just hearing that music made me wish I had been alive back then!
"My grandfather kept a journal where he mentions some of what he did. I'll read an example:"
Phantoms, Bars, & Pipes
"Today I hooked up a Dr. T's Phantom to my Amiga. It's both a SMPTE time code reader/generator and a MIDI interlace, but only lakes up one serial port. It works with ihe MIDI data recording programs, called sequencers, from Dr. T's and Blue Ribbon Soundworks."
"One nice thing about Blue Ribbon's Bars & Pipes Professional is that I can attach additional MIDI interfaces by using a multi-serial card, like Checkpoint Technology's Serial Solution, to control more channels of MIDI."
T.C. cleared his throat and said "You know, grandfather said 'MIDI interfaces,' which is redundant since the T in MIDI stands for 'interface.' Musical Instrument Digital Interface interlaces. I guess they said stuff like that back then."
He continued with the journal. "What MIDI does is to store the notes I play as numbers. The numbers represent what notes I play, when I play them, how much I accent each note, and what changes I make to the timbre of the sound while I'm holding each note. My Amiga is very good with numbers."
"But don't be fooled. Just because I'm using numbers doesn't have to lake ihe feeling away from the notes I play. Bui it does give me Ihe luxury of making changes to my performances after the fact."
"The cool thins is that the numbers I'm recording
Bars & Pipes Professional's notation, bar, and list editing windows for different tracks.
don't represent the actual sounds of the music, like the numbers on a compact disc. Instead, they record the actions my fingers lake when I perform on my MIDI controller."
"In other words, MIDI data are like the holes punched into a player piano roll. I can change ihe performance by editing the data before 1 run ihe "roll" through ihe 'player piano.' Bui with MIDI, instead of using a player piano, I can trigger the sampled sounds of any instrument or even synthesize new sounds that have never before been heard."
"And 1 can listen lo my performances again and again, at different speeds, in different keys, and using any number of different instrument combinations, all without rerecording the performance."
T.C. looked up. "I'm not sure what he meant by a player piano," he said. He looked around the room. No one seemed to know.
He went on reading. "Each MIDI interface can control up lo 16 separate MIDI sound modules. It's like having my own orchestra, heavy metal trio, African safari noises, and babbling brook lo play my music al three in the morning, when I'm inspired."
"I'm sorry about the technical jargon," said T.C. "African safari?"
No one knew thai one either. He Hipped forward in the journal. "Although the quality of the traditional music notation in Bars & Pipes Pro leaves something to be
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