I have to agree (I think) with your comments re Netscape Navigator, made in the December editorial. I just recently loaded Warp 4 on my machine, then retrieved the Netscape beta 2 and installed it. After trying it a few times I can't say I was motivated to switch from my WebExplorer 1.2.
Doug Hicken, in his article Fall COMDEX: Rumours from the Floor, Dec. 96, states companies such as InnoVal, Stardock, and True>Spectra have announced plans to go multi-platform. Why? Because, "many feel Java isn't going to be the savior of OS/2".
If these companies want to be 'saved', they should consider writing their programs using Java (or god forbid--Active X!) rather than simply writing seperate code for many platforms.
You'd think that The Ultimate Sound Page would've atleast been mentioned [in your review]...
Thanks for including an article about MOD players. Now I can replace the DOS players my son uses, giving him one less reason to reboot to DOS!
Hey, there is one more player you missed. It is called muse/2 made by a pair of gentlemen called culus and another (can't quite remember). Anyway, they both hang out at #os2prog on effnet IRC. [The player] supports every mod format I know and has the most accurate playback I have found. It has minimal CPU load and is very fast. Does MMPM DART WAV file and GUS output. I simply can not beleive that you missed this one player. It is text only but it needs no graphical interface because of its power and abilities.
- I was going to review the program, however it refused to run without crashing immediately after being started. I tried re-downloading and re-installing twice but no go. I felt it wouldn't be fair to include it in the review when I would be obligated to say that it completely failed to run at all. It's probably my fault, but there were only so many measures I could afford to take before the deadline for the article came up.
I'm going to try and get it to work again, and if (when) I do I promise to write a seperate review for it.
Julien Pierre's DSMI (digital sound mixing interface) for OS/2 used for DMP is available for those wishing to use it to develop games. I myself am purchasing a license in January (1997). I know that an unlimited freeware license is $180, and for $60, you get a one-time freeware license.
p.s. Good review... but if you really wanted to test things, you should have gone to the Hornet Archive which has all the songs in the world.
Just reading through your review of OS/2 MOD players... I thought you may like to know that the "infinite loop problem'' isn't really one at all. The MOD format allows you to jump between sequences, and to jump backwards within a sequence, thus playing the file infinitely. MOD players that support playing many MOD files in a row often recognize this and simply refuse to do a backwards jump. WOWII (for DOS), if I recall correctly, would play infinitely if you told it to play the one song, but would not loop if playing multiple songs.
Also, do you happen to know any MOD editors that work under OS/2? I've tried ScreamTracker and a few others; all but one locked my system hard. The same thing happened under Win95 on another machine, and NT simply refuses to run them. Or better, do you know how to make ST3 run under OS/2?
- I didn't think that this was quite the case with "Astronaut's Requiem" since I also played several other files which used the same loop-back feature and the player's handled them fine. In addition, players which claimed to let you switch off looping still failed the test.
I know of PMPoze, the cousin of Sounder, which is a limited MOD composer. It's available on Hobbes.nmsu.edu in the /os2/mmedia directory. It doesn't seem to be very sophisticated though. I have not tried to run any of the DOS tracker programs under OS/2 yet.
Something that seems to be failed to be mentionned at every turn is that PkWare does not have the market *completly* cornered, there are many much more viable alternatives. It's wide spread use can be attributed solely to the fact that it's been in use since the early beginning (we could very well all be using Arc right now too, which is even worse).
I'd like to suggest such a viable alternative: Rar, by Eugene Roshal. It compresses *much* better and tighter than PKzip ever did, on any file. It supports multiple disk spanning, wether it having 1.44M free space or 2k, the option to save configurations and use a graphical shell, and best of all, has a Dos and Os/2 native versions out!
In my opinion, it's simply *the* best compressor out there. I'll never go back to the zip format again!
I have to ask you to calm down a little on your rave of Slice/2 and Splice/2. I'm sure they're very nice little programs, but there's really nothing special about them. There are numerous splitting (and joining) programs out there for free. Any programmer could write a simplistic splitting program in ten lines of code. A joining program is even easier; just use the OS/2 (or even MS-DOS) copy program!
copy /b part1+part2+part3 resultfileI hope Slice/2 and Splice/2 offer more than what the article indicates. Otherwise, it's hard to justify any registration fee.
Having this feature (with checksums) integrated into Info-ZIP would be benifitial for the sake of simplicity. From the article, it doesn't sound like Slice/2 or Splice/2 (or any program I know of) offer's that capability. I await the next version of Info-ZIP.
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