CD-ROM GAMES Welcome to the first commercial games demonstration CD-ROM. This CD-ROM contains over 120 of the playable floppy and CD-ROM product demos that are currently available. An unprecedented feat! All demos are accessible from an easy-to-use menu system, and all come with help files. There are over 700Mbytes worth of game demos on this CD-ROM. You're guaranteed many hours of entertainment and enjoyment from the multitide of stunning playable demos present on this disc. Please note that not all the game demos on this CD-ROM will work with all PC systems. Unfortunately this is a problem inherent with PC software due to the diverse range of PC hardware and the many expansion cards available. Most of the demos will run directly from the CD-ROM. However, since many of these demos were not designed to run from a read-only directory, some will not operate unless they are first copied to your hard disk. In each of these cases, you are prompted with information about the hard disk space requirements, and whether you want the demo to be moved to your hard disk. In almost all cases the demos will be installed into the \GAMES directory of the hard disk of your choice. You will be informed whenever a game demo needs to be installed to another directory. Your feedback on this CD-ROM is welcome. Please send your comments to: CD-ROM GAMES Paragon Publishing Ltd 124 Old Christchurch Rd Bournemouth Dorset BH1 1NF ENGLAND Tel: 01202 299900 Fax: 01202 299955 Email: paragon@itoday.demon.co.uk USING THE MENU SYSTEM From the DOS prompt log onto your CD-ROM drive. For instance, D: [return] where D is the CD-ROM drive letter. Next type MENU [return] to run the menu program. Please note you can also type MENU H [return] or MENU - [return] to disable help files from appearing before game demos run. A warning will appear if the menu program thinks your system has insufficient memory to run the majority of game demos featured on the CD-ROM. If the error message appears you can either continue and try to run the game demos or you can reconfigure your system to free up more memory. Details of how to do this can be found later in this help file. The first time you run the menu program, you will be confronted with a screen requesting you to press a letter which corresponds to the hard disk you would like to store temporary files and game demos which won't run from CD-ROM. Next comes the first screen of the menu itself. It will look something like this: COMMERCIAL GAME DEMOS: MENU 1 Type in the number corresponding to the item you wish to run and press Return. X [return] - EXIT A [return] - NEXT MENU B [return] - PREVIOUS MENU H [return] - TOGGLE HELP (currently on) M [return] - MAKE BOOT DISC 1 1942 Pacific Air War 16 Comanche: Maximum Overkill 2 Airlines 17 Complete Chess System II 3 Alone in the Dark II 18 Countdown 4 Arcade Pool 19 Creature Shock 5 Armour-Geddon 20 Crystal Maze 6 Battle Bugs 21 Cyber Race 7 Battlehawk 22 D-Day: The Beginning of the End 8 Battle Isle 2 23 Dawn Patrol 9 Beneath a Steel Sky 24 Desert Strike 10 Blues Brothers 25 Detroit 11 Bridge Champion With Omar Sharif 26 Diggers 12 Brutal Sports 27 Doom v1.5 13 Campaign 2 28 Dragon Sphere 14 Cannon Fodder 29 Dreamweb 15 Clockwiser 30 EA Kids TYPE SELECTION AND PRESS RETURN> To run Cannon Fodder, for instance, type 14 and press return. The game demo will run. When you exit the demo you will be returned to the menu screen. As well as running the game demos featured on the menu screen you can type in the following: A [return] to advance to the next menu screen. B [return] to go back a menu screen. H [return] to toggle game demo help files on and off. Each game demo comes with a help file. You can read the help file before running the game if the help feature is on. This is indicated at the top of the menu in the line H [return] - TOGGLE HELP (currently on). If you start the menu system by typing MENU [return], the help system will automatically be on. If you start the menu with MENU H [return] or MENU - [return], help will be off. M [return] to make a floppy boot disk. You may need to create a floppy boot disk if your system is low on memory. See MEMORY ERRORS further on in this file for more information. X [return] to exit the menu system and return to DOS. RUNNING FROM HARD DISK Most of the demos on this CD-ROM run directly from the CD-ROM. However, many of these demos were designed for operation from a hard disk. Hence the performance may not accurately reflect the actual performance of the game. This is especially true if your CD-ROM drive has a slower transfer rate than 150Kb/sec. Do take this performance degradation into account when playing these demos. For most game demos it is possible to copy the directory containing the demo to your hard disk to improve performance. Do note that some of these directories are very large, so check the size before attempting to copy. Some demos also contain subdirectories; these need to be copied correctly for proper operation of the demo from your hard disk. MEMORY ERRORS Although your computer has a large amount of memory installed, you may experience "insufficient memory" errors due to the configuration of your particular computer when trying to run some of the demos. There are many TSR (terminate and stay resident) programs available for today's IBM compatible systems that load into your system's memory and allow you to continue to use your computer for other applications. Examples of TSR programs are mouse drivers, disk compression utilities, memory managers, disk cache programs and many more. Since these programs stay in memory, they use memory that the game demos on this CD-ROM may require. Often TSR programs are required for proper functionality of your system and simply need to be loaded in different areas of your system's memory. If you get "insufficient memory" errors there are two things you can try: 1. Manually reconfigure your AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files located in the root directory of your hard disk. 2. Use the BOOTDISK program on this CD-ROM to create a floppy boot disk. Full instructions for this can be found by typing M [return] from the main menu.