From the desktop

One of the great cultural creations of our time is the CD-ROM-basedktop, or a load of old cods? Get away from it all with a virtual journey on a 1914 express train. demo. You know the sort of thing. It starts with a 3D animated text effect whizzing around a celestial body or two, with a voiceover: "Since the dawn of time, man has striven ..." Later, you realise that what man has been striving to do since the dawn of time is to use OLAP technology to drill down through data on a remote server and display information in a variety of graphical formats. Whatever that means.

The thing that always fascinates me is where they get the really awful music that runs in the background while Mr or Ms Cheesy shows off the finer points of the product (sorry, solution) in jerky video. At last, I am in a position to divulge this trade secret. I have a CD called MultiMusic, from a British company, Mantra, which according to the accompanying letter, aims to "provide a little bit of soul to the desktop, quality with flair, a breath of fresh air to computer users". There's over 550Mb of .WAV clips in both high-quality versions (I speak of technical quality) for disk-based use, and super-compressed low-quality for web use.

Titles range from African Dawn ("emerging rhythmic theme, swirling, savannah, chanting, humid") to Trade Zone ("corporate identity 4/4, optimistic, impact, strings, travel"). All include Mechanical Royalties - in other words, you can reproduce them without further payment, and all are truly awful. At only #19.95, this non-music for non-music lovers is the perfect addition to any presentation or demonstration.

Fishy tales

Moving from the unspeakable to the inedible, it's time again for one of our hard-hitting, back-to-back contests. This month it's that desktop essential, virtual fish.

In the red tank we have the shareware program, AquaScape. This is a virtual aquarium featuring many species, including real fish and cartoon characters.

It's infinitely configurable, from the number of fish to the colour of the water and the amount of bubbles. This, for me, was its chief attraction, and the registered version offers even more displacement activity with six option-packed configuration tabs and a step-by-step guide to setting up a real aquarium. Visually it's rather crude, and it crashed my system trying, for some mysterious reason, to switch to 256-colour mode. However, what its authors lack in graphic subtlety, they make up in fish lore.

Over in the blue tank is the MOPy fish, from Hewlett-Packard). Like AquaScape, it works either as a screensaver or on demand. You can download it free from the HP web site, but first you have to answer a short questionnaire.

For some reason it wasn't happy with the true information I volunteered, so I began again and fed it a bunch of lies, which it happily swallowed.

After a 1.35Mb download (which expanded by a miracle of Living Zempel to 9Mb) I had my fish - singular.

You start off with just the fish and a supply of food. As time goes on, you acquire MOPy points. The process is accelerated if you make multiple printed copies of a document. MOPy stands for Multiple Original Printouts and is a Good Thing for All of Us in general, and HP's consumables division in particular. You need to feed your fish and play with it, otherwise it will sulk or possibly develop SFA (Serious Fish Attitude). And if you think that's creepy, check out the words of stress management consultant David Gates: "The stress-relieving benefits of fish and aquaria are well documented and the PC screen provides the ideal habitat for a virtual pet fish. The owner will experience all the calming influences of a real pet fish - on the desktop."

As you amass MOPy points, you gradually acquire items of tank furniture - a plant, rock, bubbles and a thermometer, but there's only one of each and little you can do to customise them. The strong point is sheer fish quality: the MOPy fish (Piscenus mopei floataneus) was developed using a million photos of a Parrot fish (Hoplachus psitticus); the near-photographic animation is astonishing. The fish swims in three dimensions, never seeming to repeat its movements.

When you have amassed 3,200 MOPy points you can return to the web site and download the special aphrodisiac fish food. This "makes your fish so affectionate that it rewards you with a kiss, leaving its lip marks on the screen." That's not just creepy, that's the sort of thing they send you to prison for in the more morally robust of the United States.

Wake up to TalkWorld

When something arrives from the PCW office with "God alone knows who dreamed this one up" scribbled across the accompanying letter, I know I am in for a rare treat. Even better, I was able to run TalkWorld direct from the CD without having to install anything. This fired up my internet connection and I entered the wacky world of virtual reality chat. I logged in with my privileged press password and chose my avatar; you can be male or female, with an exciting choice of naff outfits. Various sub-divisions in the window showed my avatar, a 3D view of my location and whatever text was being typed by myself or other users. Moving around TalkWorld was difficult. The mouse pointer took an age to stagger across the screen and scrolling around the tiny virtual reality room was like swimming in treacle. Someone named Webmaster said "Hi".

"I am stuck in a barrel of treacle," I replied.

"I can see that," retorted Webmaster.

"Is it always this slow?" I asked.

"Hi!" said Webmaster. So, in search of more stimulating company, I teleported from the museum to the tavern. The only animate object was a pendulum clock ticking away with a ten-second swing (time passes slowly in TalkWorld).

It turned out there were only three other users online. At this point my ISP obligingly pulled the plug, as it tends to do from time to time, and I returned gratefully to the real world.

You can log in as a guest for free but without some of the advanced features, such as voicemail. So, if it's any better by the time you read this, wake me up and tell me.

Ripping yarns

Sticking with virtual reality, I must admit I don't often play computer games. Mainly because after a hard day stuck in front of the screen I'm more than ready for some real reality, preferably involving people, food and drink. And I think I lack that killer instinct necessary in games which involve slaughter or driving fast. Or indeed both. But I have rather been enjoying a virtual journey in the Last Express, by Broderbund.

This is a truly Buchanesque ripping yarn, set on the Orient Express in 1914. You play Robert Cath, summoned by your old friend Tyler Whitney (even then, Americans had weird names), but when you board the train, you find your chum brutally slain.

Exploring the train brings you into contact with a cast of players talking a babel of languages and your mission is to interact, or eavesdrop, to progress through the game. All the usual characters are here: the German industrialist, the Russian anarchist, the Eastern potentate, the British spy, the pistol-packing femme fatale and more.

There's something for everyone here, from finding clues in newspapers to hand-to-hand combat, but the stunning thing is the atmosphere. The players are based on filmed actors: each frame was turned into line-art, then hand coloured, which gives a realistically fluid yet hand-drawn effect.

The interiors are sumptuous, with cut glass, plush fabrics, exotic hardwoods and polished brass, ray-traced to gleaming perfection. The work that has gone into this, both in terms of historical research and graphic design, is astounding.

Any other business

- In my October column, I mentioned the screen capture utility SnagIt and wrote that you could capture the entire contents of a scrolling window as a very tall bitmap, although I couldn't actually think of a use for this. Colm Piercy, of Digiweb Ireland, could: "Now we can capture the entire length of a web page, to have a hard copy for our portfolio; a horrendous process otherwise involving multiple captures and heavy-duty cutting and pasting."

- To all enquirers, that ultimate nerd accessory, the T-Shirt with a readme file on (backwards) which I mentioned in last month's column, has now found an owner.

- The impossible FreeCell card game (mentioned last month) for those who really want to drive themselves mad, is number 11982.

Honestly, I don't make these up ...

This month's award for "Technology in Marketing" goes to the company that emailed me suggesting that I, or my office supply manager, might like to pop into their shop to stock up on toner cartridges. The shop is in Atlanta, USA. It gets better. The final line of the email message reads: "We are sorry, but email orders or inquiries are not accepted at this time."

PCW Contacts

Tim Nott is at timn@cix.co.uk

Aquascape www.multipro.com/runpro/AquaScape.htm

Broderbund (The Last Express) 01429 273029 www.lastexpress.com

MOPyfish www.interactive.hp.com/fish/main.html

MultiMusic www.mantra.co.uk TalkWorld www.etchinghill.com.