Amiga Computing - Commodore Is Awesome

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54 GRAPHICS t the start of this year, Panasonic announced a new dual-function quad-speed CD-ROM drive. So what? Well, it was a quad-speed CD-ROM drive and - this is where it gets good - a 650Mb magneto optical drive all in the same box, but for not that much more than a standard quad-speed drive. The adverts started appearing and eventually we got one to look at for ourselves. So is it any good? Let's start with the way it is built. The drive looks like any standard CD-ROM drive from the outside with the exception of the PO logo on the front panel. When you open that panel you will notice another difference. It has a tray within a tray kind of affair, one for the PD cartridge and one for a normal CD. Because of the height difference between a standard CD and one of these cartridges, this tray within a tray thingy becomes necessary - the interior tray moving upwards when it retracts if there is a normal CD in it. The PD cartridge itself actually shares many of the same dimensions as a CDs R O M caddy - which you should have some familiarity with if you own an older CD-ROM drive. However. the PD cartridge will not work in caddy-based CD-ROM dnves which is a great shame as it would certainly put this drive into my all-time top ten list of products. SITTING PRETTY The drive is nice and easy to install with jumper-based termination (rather than resistor packs which can be awkward to remove and replace) and sits quite happily in the top bay of my machine. Software installation is certainly a lot less complicated than the many disks of installation software for the PC and Mac included in the box would suggest. If you are using an Amiga with a SCSI interface built-in like an A3000, nothing needs changing. However, the drive isn't particularly happy with all controllers - it does work on a GVP controller and also on our A2091, but it didn't like the A4091 SCSI II controller we use in our A4000 at work. U you do get it working then all you need do is load up HDToolbox, or its equivalent on your machine, and partition the cartridge the same way you would with any new hard drive. As for the CD-ROM famoatibilitg (ro55roads It is a shame. as I already said, that the cartridge system isn't a little more compatible. If it worked in the same way as standard MO drives there would at least be some cross-'platform• compatibility. As it is, the only drive you can read a PD cartridge in is Panasonic's own drive. It also has to be hoped that the PD drive is going to be more compatible in the future with hard drive controllers. Some of the SCSI controllers the PD drive does work with include the GVP hard card, HiSolt's Squirrel controller the embedded SCSI controller in A3000s and thus Commodore's own A2091, and the new Datanyer SCSI controller for the Al200. A side of things, using AmiCDROM is extremely simple and you can set up the PD drive as a CD-ROM unit with the same ease that you set up the cartridge side of things. How well does the drive perform? According to Sysinfo the cartridge runs along at a nice steady meg a second, although copying files to and from the drive in °Opus puts the lie to those figures. In a test I did copying roughly 10Mbs worth of 24-bit pictures, it look six minutes and 40 seconds to write all 10Mbs to the PD drive, and just one minute and 50 seconds to copy them from the PD drive back onto my hard drive (which. incidentally, is rated as giving me a little over three megabytes a second). This obviously means that in real world terms the drive only writes at about a meg every 40 seconds. not quite as fast as Sysinto suggests. On the plus side it does mean that the drive reads at about a meg every eleven seconds - still not a great speed but at least better than its write speed. I should point out, though, that the speed for reads and writes does vary quite a lot and is not always as slow as the figures I have printed, The CD-ROM's speed is a lot more predictable. Seeing that the drive is supposed to be a quad-speed • AM Amiga Computing OCTOBER 1995 / drive, you'd expect to get around t 600ka secondmark.And,nosurpn es here, that's exactly what you do get In conclusion, I would have to say that wouldn't use the Panasonic PD drive an everyday replacement for a hard dri but if you are going to use it for archiv or as a final step before mastering a C then this unit provides significant value f ar money. For users out there that haven yel bought a CD-ROM drive, it is perha worth pe waiting for a bit and saving up t extra cash to get your hands on an a tional 664Mb of hard drive space at the same time. As each additional 664Mb car -tridge only costs fifty quid it remains pro ably the cheapest way of beefing up yo Amiga at the lowest possible cost SYSTEM MUMS RED :.,ential BLACK • Recommended (eesesseireee) vseessesesej SCSI controller The bottom line Product: Panasonic PD drive Price: 069,95 Supplier: HiC) Ltd. Tel: 0181-909 2092 Ease of use 9 Implementation 8 Value for money 9 Overall 9
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Page 37 and 38: SAVE - SAVE en Nee Roe • SAVE 1%4
Page 39 and 40: I the PC card and it's driving me m
Page 41 and 42: 100 TOP DEMOS The Lome isolloolloo
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Page 53: he y' iott s net era PC , nin ent a
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Page 59 and 60: Video footage - starling rn a house
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Page 67 and 68: Li Ti n • 60 SPEED FOR YOUR Al200
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Page 77 and 78: NEWT!! SCANNER Artec Colour _ • 4
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Page 81 and 82: Super Street Fighter 2 Greeted with
Page 83 and 84: Cheap thrills Guildhall Leisure and
Page 85 and 86: Battle of the beat-em-ups Super Str
Page 87 and 88: mulatons Unlimited contains Soflwar
Page 89 and 90: Your team leader will advise you wh
Page 91 and 92: °CHESS &TUTOR _ „,„„ woo „
Page 93 and 94: peccy Sensation ooking back over th
Page 95 and 96: urry but flawed Unfortunately, Brut
Page 97 and 98: with their own individual statistic
Page 99 and 100: oroview The pre- production 1 demo
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Page 103 and 104: ome AD92 was released around two or
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System Medical 1 0 7 Frank Nord tak
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hree buttons are better than two mi
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The power plug the LightWave interf
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n recent instalments I've been disc
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he other day I saw a posting on CLX
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know I've argued about this before,
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SATELLITE SMARTCARD EMULATOR! Conne
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