#NEC cd-rom gallery
6 messages in this thread
On page 337 of the DEc 31 issue of PC Magazine, NEC has an offer for
an interactive CD-ROM system including 7 cd's plus a reader and speakers
for $ 749. Does anyone have experience with these? It sounds like a good
offer.
There is 1 Reply.
The NEC CD Gallery is available from CompUSA (at least in Santa Clara) for
$569.99. The disks are mediocre, but the drive (CDR-36) is SCSI, as opposed
to the Sony CD Library which is proprietary. The board is a Trantor T128
(8-bit but solid card). The speakers are cute little Koss things, although
they're not that great (I'm using my MacSpeakers instead).
The CDR-36 is rated at 600ms seek time, so I'm nervously awaiting my first
"MPC" disk to see if it can make the grade for MM.
Disks: World Atlas (same as floppy version)
Battle Chess (ditto)
Grolier's (good content, horrid interface)
TIME Almanac (kind of neat)
Innovation Timeline (cute)
Mammals (nice for kids?)
Great Cities of the World
David,
The "Maya Computers" catalog I just got has the same bundle (more or less:
it's the Mac version) with a NEC CDR-73 for about the same price Tom
mentioned. They also have a CDR-36 bundle for a little less than what you
paid (Of course, the Mac "interface" consists of "Cable, 1 each" <g>).
Do you know whether there's actually more than one version of Grolier's
around? DAK sells what seems to be the same thing under the "Software
Toolworks" brand, and I thought I'd seen it under yet a different name. I
wonder if someone else has the same "good content" with a less "horrid"
interface.
btw, since you're in the same area: I dunno if you saw the mention of
"Computers At Large" in Saratoga the other day, but I called them up, and
met them at the computer swap over at the fairgrounds today. It's a
"home-based business" (sounds so much classier than "garage operation",
eh?), but the owner seems to be a real good guy who knows his stuff, and
his prices are very good. I know I'll be getting a disk or two from him,
and I'll probably buy a drive there, too.
Ran
There is 1 Reply.
The CDR-73 is certainly a better drive and a better bet for MPC. Remember,
the PC version gets you the DOS version of the software, vs. the Mac
version, so the drive may work with either (the NECs seem to) but the disks
won't.
Software Toolworks puts together the package for NEC, so I suspect this is
the same one. OTOH, I can't believe this is the interface for the Mac
version, so it may be cleaner. It's not really all that terrible, just
disappointing for a multi-media disk in that it is very DOS-like and kind
of dumb (hot links are in all CAPS, but you seem to have to click on the
First letter of the work to correctly traverse the link, for example).
In fairness, there are LOTS of ways to get at the material, so from a dive
in and get at something point of view the interface is actually quite
usable. It's certainly much faster than going to my Brittanica:-)
Tom, I have it and it works great! Specially the video spead when I use it
with Mammals is very good in contrast with slower drives that I have used.
I forgot to mention that there are two offers. One with NEC-72 which I
think is the one you mention and one is the cheaper NEC-36. I have NEC-72
and I am very happy with.