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Domhnall Dods tries out a Falcon specific CD

Falcon owners would appear to be flavour of the month among CD producers at the moment. Just the other month we had Transmission from German CD specialists Delta Labs and now we have All Things Falcon from American company SFT Publishing, distributed in the UK by 16/32 Systems and priced at œ16.00. Being a Scot I immediately noticed one major advantgae of this CD over the Transmission offering.....it's œ13.95 cheaper!! But is it actually any good?

Well unlike some of the German Atari CDs there is no menu driven search facility so you have to search through the directories manually. There is a text file showing the layout of the CD just in case you can't be bothered trawling through everything on your own though. The case proclaims that "prepared specifically for Falcon 030 owners, none of the software on this disc requires the use of ST emulators". Well that's sort of true, but don't be fooled into believing that everything is specifically for the Falcon, it's not. In fact of the 545Mb of files, 268Mb is actually to be found in the "graphics" folder. Of that 135Mb consists of FLC files, 87 Mb of FLI files and 3 Mb of MPEG files. Even the initially promising looking "animation" folder consists almost exclusively of further FLC and FLI files bundled with the Apex viewer. The same is true of the Sound folder where 49% of the content comprises 19Mb of mod files and 19% of the files come in the guise of just over 7Mb of Wav samples. There is actually a fair sprinkling of sound utilities and player programs but the generic files to dominate.

After sound and graphics, the other major file area on the CD consists of the demos folder. As we all know this is an area in which the Falcon excels and no Falcon specific CD worthy of the name could possibly omit demos. To prove the point All things Falcon comes with a thumping great 131 Mb of demos, nearly 25% of the contents of the CD in fact. Unfortunately as we also all know the vast majority of demos need an RGB monitor to run and true to form all sorts of weird effects appeared on screen when I tried to sample the delights on offer in the Demos folder. All I can say is that all the well known demos appear to be there plus quite a few I'd never heard of!

And so to games, the next largest section....with only 35Mb! Again the usual favourites are represented, Lasers and Men, Double Bobble, Killing Impact and Pacman on E's all make an appearance as well as other less well known games. Tetris clones abound and there is also a demo version of Towers 2. Nothing particularly outstanding however.

The only other area of any size is the section devoted to commercial demos of packages such as Apex Media, Neon and Evolution Dino Dudes (No Colin I couldn't get the demo to work any more than the real game!)

There is a folder devoted to applications with folders within it for DTP, Word Processing, Databases and so on. Despite the initial promise shown by the titles of these folders they seem to contain a high proportion of templates for Atari Works. Not a great deal of use without that particular package though.

Finally the utilities section, containing 6 Mb of files, has a fair selection of useful utility programs including one which achieves something I've been after for ages....the ability to load all your accessories from a folder rather than the root directory. Slightly less useful is a program to let you use a Jaguar Power pad instead of a mouse. Quite why you'd want to do this other than in the event of a sudden mouse failure I don't know but it's there just in case. Overall though there is nothing radically different from utility folders to be found on other Atari CDs such as Skyline or the various Bernd Lohrum collections.

Overall I couldn't help feeling slightly disappointed with this CD. It claims to be Falcon specific but over half the contents are generic sound and graphic files which could be used just as easily on lesser Atari machines. Equally many of the games and utilities are just as much at home on my old STFM as on its newer cousin. Having said that if you don't already have a collection of FLI, WAV and MOD files you could do a lot worse than this. You'd also get a fair smattering of Atari specific PD but you could also get that from any of the other Atari CDs. The difference with this collection is that the compilers have made sure that everything will work on a Falcon. I did find quite a few files which refused to run but that may be due to the absence of an RGB monitor. One very big plus in its favour is the presence of a patch to allow Civilisation to run on the Falcon. Having tried various other such patches I was dubious about the chances of ever playing my all time favourite game again. I am delighted to report that the patch was 100% successful and I am once again about to embark on a cmapign of world domination. If you're not a CIvilisation fan though and are not that keen on animation.....try elsewhere, the Mega Archive CD for example is much better value.

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