Why did it start?
By Phil Wilkinson proprietor of 5DSoftware
Way back in the winter of 1994, trouble reared it's loathsome head over our beloved Amiga. The good times had gone and with them the support of all the large software companies, their attention now turned to the PeeCee. I had used the Amiga since the first WB1.2 A500 in the late eighties and always supported the machine and PD markets, during 1994 I decided to leave my job and started my own Public Domain library called "SaddleTramps PD", which is still a very active and successful company in it's own right. I quickly acquired the distribution rights for the two main licenceware schemes at the time, CLR and F1. It soon became clear that the CLR scheme was, shall we say, in a bit of trouble. It was losing all the support and respect of it's programmers and was consequently going to close. At this point I decided to start a new company and so 5th Dimension Licenceware was born.
I contacted many friends, programmers, and customers to find out just what they expected to gain from either submitting titles to or buying titles from 5DL, the response was amazing!! Ideas came in thick and fast and gradually I was able to create an exiting new structure to suit everyone programmers, distributers, customers, and even little old me ;) Competitors though that the aggressive pricing structure and the complete new approach to licenceware would never work, but as you see to their dismay, it did.
The main battle plan is simple, 5DL can produce high quality Amiga software for a retail price that anyone can afford, if bought directly from ourselves it's even supplied in a rather smart plastic case complete with printed insert card at no extra cost, so keeping your software investment safe. Customers are getting excellent value for money, programmers are getting their titles presented with the respect they deserve, and putting profits into their pockets for all the time spent in development. Everybody wins with 5DL and the Amiga is kept alive.
5DL is now into its second year of trading in the Amiga market place and things are going very well, coverage of our titles in the press has been good. The CLR scheme did close and so we were able to fill a gap in the market and move along side F1L, who's titles we still support and sell along side our own range. The owner of F1 (Steve Bye) and myself are always in contact and operate with a friendly rivalry, both fully committed to seeing the Amiga back on top.
The success of 5DL so far does not mean that we are sitting back and resting on our laurels, new titles are still in development and great things are planned for the coming year. Our latest release comes complete with a fully printed manual (not photocopied) and is written/produced in house by us to enhance this great new product.
Amivoice is a brand new invoice/order form creator with some innovative ideas, the program saves all the invoices/orders to disk and allows you to find any data within seconds, it can printout a whole days work in one session, allows you to enter stock codes, plus much much more. A new paint package Belle's Paint V2.0 as just been released and some of the titles will be totally updated for 1997. One of the main problems I found with other schemes was the repetition of titles in the collection, thus making an impressively long but misleading program list. At 5DL we are constantly looking at our current titles and checking their value in the scheme and seeing if any improvements can be made, if changes can be made or a new version is released then the title is directly updated and not added to the end of our lists.
This creates a small but perfectly formed collection ;)
5D is now the fastest growing licenceware company in the UK. Our high standards and vigarious testing ensures the released software will always perform as advertised. We receive many letters from customers praising our excellent service and product range, try us yourself today and you'll wonder why you didn't try us sooner.
Programmers are always pleased with the care and enthusiasm we show towards their titles. They also know that if a program is excepted onto the 5D books it must be of the very highest quality.
Keep your eyes open in the Amiga press for details of our first full commercial release during 1997. 5th Dimension is expanding and as a result we thought a slight name change would be in order and so 5DSoftware was born. Two full commercial games are in production, the projects are well under way and could be ready for a summer release.
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