If people like Bill Gates (Microsoft Corp.) and John Sculley (Apple Computer Inc.) are right-and these chairmen got very rich by being right-CD-ROM stands poised to change how humans inform and entertain themselves.
Welcome to the world of Compact Disc-Read Only Memory (CD-ROM). I’d like to use the wonderful, but not ready for prime time, Revell Power Modeler CD-ROM to illustrate that a medium so new has applications that are still being discovered.
Likewise, I’ll use a CD-ROM reader called the MultiSpin 74 from NEC’s Advanced Media division in suburban Wood Dale to illustrate the hardware issues involved in hitching your desktop to the multimedia star. It’s a booming industry that’s getting bigger every day. Marc Miller, chief of NEC’s Wood Dale facility, expects to sell 1 million CD-ROM readers over the next year with a suggested retail of $500 to $700.
Michael Koss, chairman of Koss Corp. in Milwaukee, a company that specializes in making stereo headphones and small amplified speakers, said that his company’s sales have exploded with the advent of CD-ROM and that Koss now makes 15 percent of its gross selling speakers to those upgrading their machines for multimedia.
More about the hardware in a bit. First the software: The engineers at Revell-Monogram Inc., the Morton Grove-based company whose plastic models of cars, planes, ships etc. are known worldwide, have seized on multimedia technology to produce what promises to become an almost irresistible diversion.
I call it “Daddy in a box,” an eternally patient surrogate that knows far more about putting together model kits than could any mere mortal mom or pop. Like all CD-ROMs, the Revell European Racers kit draws its strength from the fact that the compact discs known for more than a decade now as carriers of music are capable of holding vast amounts of computer data. A single disc carries 600 megabytes, larger than all but the most expensive hard drives and capable of storing full-motion video, sound and endless amounts of text. Revell has taken the same applications that more serious-minded CD-ROM packages use to hold data like interactive encyclopedias. Revell has also turned what is already a toy for adults into one for younger folk as well.
The box includes a plastic car to assemble and a CD-ROM that uses mini-movies, sound effects, computer assisted drawing (CAD) and other technologies to walk a youngster through the process. Sarah Merz, marketing director for Revell-Monogram, said that the company has big plans to expand the CD-ROM line to include many of its other products, like the Visible Man and Visible Woman (remember those see-through anatomy figures?), dinosaur models and its complex lines of military hardware as well. The first is called European Racers.
The main screen on the car package is a picture of a garage. You move about with a standard mouse and click on various objects, like the car, a toolbox or a filing cabinet, in order to call up various parts of the program. Among the features are graphics in which each of the 100 or so car parts are shown in exploded views so that you can tell where each goes. When you click on an individual part, the screen fills with a picture of the plastic frame where the parts are attached and the one you clicked in enclosed in a box making it easy to find.
Also on the disc are movies showing the car in actual races and a really fun computer car racing game in which you get to race the car you’ve assembled. This game is as good as anything Sega or Nintendo offer. And because its on CD-ROM you get features far beyond computer game boxes, like little films in which a traffic cop walks up to the window of your Porsche 911 Slant Nose and gives you a warning about driving too fast.
If you goof up badly and wreck your car beyond redemption, a grandfatherly tow truck driver comes along a takes you back to the garage. If the suggested retail price of $70 shocks you, keep in mind that most of the hottest new Sega and Nintendo game cartridges go for more than $50 and Revell-Monogram’s product is every bit as diverting as Sonic the Hedgehog II or the latest Super Mario Brothers.
Besides, by the time you fork over the money you’ll need to get a multimedia personal computer up and running, $70 will seem like a mere drop in the bucket.
Which brings us to hardware: You can go two routes. You can either buy a machine already set up as a multimedia package or you can open the case of your current IBM compatible machine and install the two devices you’ll require: a sound card and a CD-ROM “reader.”
Almost all the computer stores carry at least one “bundled” multimedia package with an internal CD-ROM reader and sound card all hooked up. They tend to run a couple of hundred dollars on either side of $2,000. All of the same considerations that go into choosing whether to go with a Macintosh or an IBM compatible machine exist in the CD-ROM world as well. There are far more titles available for the IBM types, but the Macintosh is very well represented and most titles that catch on eventually come out in a Mac version as well. Revell’s spokeswoman said the European Racers will be sold for the Mac early next year.
Because of compatibility issues, I chose the NEC MultiSpin 74 as a reader. It can either hook up to a Macintosh through the SCSI port, which comes with all Macs, or to an IBM compatible by way of a SCSI card that you stick into one of your machine’s expansion slots. With sound built in most Macintoshes you don’t need the sound cards that you must have with IBM compatible machines.
The NEC CD-ROM reader is highly regarded because it is capable of accessing the data at a rate of 300 kilobytes per second, twice the rate that machines were performing when it was introduced last year. It is dramatically faster than my other CD-ROM reader.
Finally you need a sound card if you go the IBM route since its hardware does not produce sound. Here the standard is set by a product called Sound Blaster with a suggested retail of about $200. Several competitors market boards advertised as “Sound Blaster compatible” and then generally work well.
But compatibility can be a real problem at this stage in the game and there are pitfalls everywhere. For example the Revell European Racers will work only with a Sound Blaster brand card. Revell’s marketing director Merz said that future releases will work with all the various sound cards, but for the present only that fraction of the CD-ROM equipped using Sound Blaster brand cards can make European Racers work.
And that’s why Revell’s great idea isn’t quite ready for prime time.
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Tribune computer writer James Coates can be reached on the Internet at jcoates1aol.com
