Ok here's the story.

CM2 is a brilliant piece of coding. Unfortunately as a piece of market
research, it sucks bigtime.

CM2 runs on a 2Mb Amiga. To do this the coders have had to implement
virtual memory. Remember that this is not an HD installable game. Yes
folks, that's right, CM2 pages virtual memory from floppy.

No problem, just so long as you have 4Mb you should be OK, right? Nope. It
doesn't check for extra memory. Accelerators don't help much either, as the
real bottle neck is the floppy drive access. Oh, and apparently it doesn't
work on 060s and therefore quite likely 040s.

There is one choice of screen resolution, a low res low colour display.
They have had to do this not because they are writing for OCS machines but
because they can't spare the memory. The backgrounds have been replaces by
a selection of tesselating patterns which would have been a good compromise
back in the days when HD ownership was in the minority in the Amiga
community.

Sorry Even, the team data is end of last season. More recent data is
available, there's a CM97-98 about to be released on the PC.

Oddly the search engine and the game itself work fast and effectively. Alas
you have to wait 20-30 mins between turns.

The implementation jacks the OS out completely and hits the floppy hardware
direct. Do not expect it to work on any non standard drives (a4000, ezdf0,
HD drives, obscure late C= implementations..., who knows what else).

Apart from all this, it is a brilliant game. Seriously, I mean that. It
misses a few minor points from the PC version but adds a few nice ergonomic
bonuses.

What can be done? I have been in contact with the guy in charge of the
coding house, who really wants to fix it. He has even offered to buy the
game from Eidos and do it himself. I have been in contact with the quality
assurance manager from eidos. His opinion of CM2 Amiga is that he would
like to persuade them upstairs to make it HD installable and compatible
with his '060 :)

The problem is that it is likely to take them a couple of months to fix it
and the management want it out now. They don't realise how bad this is
going to make them look compared with the minor embarassment (if anyone
would notice!) of a couple more months delay.

If anyone has some comments (make them short!) and is bored of getting no
replies from Eidos,  e-mail them to me and I will see that the correct
people get them.


Andrew Korn,  CU Amiga Magazine

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