Pyramid Pick: Dragon Magazine Archive CD-ROM

Pyramid Pick

Dragon Magazine Archive CD-ROM

Directed by Rob Voce

Published by TSR/Wizards of the Coast

$49.99 list; prices may vary

Minimum System Requirements: Windows 95/98 or WindowsNT (but see below); 16MB RAM; Pentium 75MHz (although mine's running fine on a non-Intel processor); 1MB VGA; 800×600 Screen Resolution in 16-bit Color; Mouse; CD-ROM Drive; 20MB of free Hard Drive space.

First, a little background. I'm not a great fan of TSR, but I did play Dungeons & Dragons through most of the 80s. D&D was my introduction to gaming, and it was a good one.

Recently I have been going through a period of heavy nostalgia for those "good old" days. When the release of the Dragon Magazine Archive was announced, I instantly flashed back to a dreary autumn afternoon, tucked in the library, reading an article in Dragon about the new "Beastmaster" NPC class for AD&D. On the strength of that nostalgic vision alone, I decided to buy the archive.

I am glad I did. It was worth the price. Here's how it all breaks down, starting with the negatives:

It's not Macintosh compatible: I own a "PeeCee" box, but I work for HP's Macintosh group, so I'm more than normally sensitive to the world of the Mac. This product fails pretty badly in the Mac world. Because the actual archive is in Adobe's PDF format, the files can be read by anyone with a Macintosh and Adobe Acrobat. Unfortunately, the search utilities that make the archive accessible are not available to Mac users. (You UNIX wonks . . .

This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.



Article publication date: November 25, 1999

Copyright © 1999 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.