{fh4BE48B0PDCD-2 
{fh2BE48B0The Datafile
{fb1000000
It was inevitable that a public domain CD full of software for the 32-bit Acorn computers would be released sooner or later, and I wasn't surprised when a joint effort from CD-Circle and _The Datafile_"Reviews.Apps.ProArt242" PD library produced PDCD1. I was surprised, however, to see the sequel, PDCD2 released just a few months later boasting nearly double the software! On the CD is an amazing 400Mb of software to use, and admittedly some of it is commercial, but it is all useful!

Two copies of the Database written by Dirk-Willem van Gulik can be found on the disk; one to find applications on the CD, and the other to order software from the Datafile collection.

The CD is split into 18 categories; Animation, Books, Clip art, Commercial, Demos, _Education_"Regulars.Education1", Fractals, Games, Graphics, Maestro music, _Morphs_"PD.Apps.Morph/121", _PCEmulator_"Features.Windows", Raytraced files, Samples, Sillies, STracker tunes, _Digital Symphony_"Features.DSymTut1" tunes and Utilities.

A supplementary manual and floppy disc is given with the CD, the manual serves as a printed copy of the database, and can be used when sifting through the files on the CD. I personally didn't find it very useful, but I put this down to being more of a `double click before you read the manual` type person than someone who reads the manual beforehand.

Also, a floppy disc is given with the CD, and contains a few files that are corrupted on the CD, as well as a copy of !ArcFS (Which most users have, but it's better to give it to everyone, than have a handful complain about not being able to access the files!).

By now, I know a lot of you will be wanting me to just show a list of how many megabytes are in each directory. So, here goes with the list, I haven't used the official size of 1Mb (1024 x 1024 = 1,048,576 bytes) - I have simply taken one meg as 1 million bytes...
{fb1FF0000
     Animation -  23.1Mb
            Books -    3.6Mb
          Clip art -  33.5Mb
  Com Demos -    7.5Mb
           Demos -  15.7Mb
      Education -    5.0Mb
         Fractals -  12.3Mb
           Games -  13.4Mb
        Graphics -  73.5Mb
         Maestro -    1.8Mb
          Morphs -    5.6Mb
   PCEmulator -    2.8Mb
      Raytraced -    2.8Mb
         Samples -  29.3Mb
             Sillies -   6.1Mb
        Strackers -  75.1Mb
      Symphony -  81.1Mb
          Utilities -  22.1Mb
              Total - 414.3Mb
{spcd
{fb1000000I was amazed by the amount of SoundTracker tunes on the CD, all are archived, and turn out to be about 70% of their original size. It is nigh-on impossible to sift through all the tunes, I used !PDTracker v4.23 with it's special search facility, and it found over 709 tunes (Which I'm listening to at the minute!). There are a wide variety, from rave to classical, everyone's music taste can be catered for by these tunes!

The Utilities directory, even though it looks to be only a small portion of what is on the disc, is actually quite a lot. There are over 160 applications, all are archived, and are all very high quality.

One thing I found that was very useful is the way that you can search for a file or utility. You simply enter a word into a standard dialogue box, and as soon as you click the search icon, it finds a match (or tells you it can't find anything). However, once you've found a match, you do need to resort to digging in the directories to find the file you want, as the viewer doesn't have any way of running the file by just double clicking on it's description or name.

There is a PCEmulator directory, which contains several Archimedes archives of PC shareware or PD that will run under the emulator. Amongst them are two games packs and various educational applications.

I found one thing rather odd on the disc, however, the samples were stored in a format so that they could be double clicked on to play, rather than dragging to a sample player like !SampConv or similar. This made the top quality samples seem a bit of a waste of space to me, as you can't extract and use them. 

The next disc, PDCD3, will most probably show its face at the spring show; Dave McCartney told me that he would like all the software on the CD to be of the highest quality
