...........................................................................

                            - scenery64 cd #1 -

                       (c) Scenery Project 2001-2002

...( iNTRODuCTION )........................................................

Hi friends, and welcome to the first in a hopefully long line of scenery64
cd's. The aim of this series is to make a cd collection of c64 software,
and do it in such a way that it is the best-sorted, most complete collection
available. We hope that this first edition will whet the appetites of
everyone, and make the scenery64 'brand' something that people will enjoy
being a part of.

This cd is a tribute to the c64 scene, and in keeping with the technology it
praises it is ofcourse - like all the best software - free. It may be freely
copied, uploaded to ftp sites (though we request it be done as an iso, to
preserve the work that has gone into the structure of the cd), or spread in
any other way. No money may be charged for its distribution. Enjoy! =]


...( fEATURES )............................................................

Below we will list just a few of the excellent reasons for owning a
scenery64 cd. Think you've got all the software out there? Think again.
Scenery64 cd #1 features among other things:

- Massive games section
  * extensive reviews of every single crack
  * credits, copyright and trivia for each game
  * multiple versions included
  * massive retrocrack section
  * everything crossreferenced

- Exlusive software contributed by Sauron/Illusion, including development
  sources, owncoded cracking software, and introlinkers.

- more to come...


...( pHILOSOPHY )..........................................................

Just a few words to explain the philosophy behind the extensive and - we
believe - unique sorting of releases in this collection. First of all,
games. We have decided to include as many versions of all games as possible,
and this is also the area where most remains to be done in collecting
material not yet available online. We hope to bring our users some truly
exclusive material... Another aspect is the sorting. We have decided to sort
all game releases into three main subcategories: pre-1995, post-1995 and
retro. Let me explain; pre-1995 is every game released before 1995, which is
about the time that the commercial market for games had its last few death
twitches. These are the full-price games. They are then sub-sorted
alphabetically, by the name each game. post-1995 is every game released
AFTER 1995. Since the commercial market died, quite a few games have
appeared. These have been budget or public domain games mostly, and with
very few exceptions have not achieved the quality that was inherent in the
old games scene. These are sub-sorted by group and release year. The final
category, retro is (imho) the most interesting these days. These are NEW
cracks of classic games, making 'perfect' versions of games from the past.
These are then sub-sorted by group and release number, which has become a
standard for these groups.

The demoscene, then. We have opted to sort any product released by or linked
to the demoscene under the name of the group they were released under, and
then sub-sorted by year. This means that f.ex. some diskmagazines are split
over several groups, but we felt this was the best - and most correct -
solution nevertheless.

We are still looking at solutions for the tools category.

In the end, a few words on our fileformat and compression philosophy.
Emulators have been a big help in our development of this cd, and to be fair
it IS still the way most users are going to be using this. We wanted a
single format throughout the cd, and furthermore we needed a format that was
compatible with the best, most widespread emulators. We also needed a format
that could be easily transferred back to real c64s. The choice, when you
looked at our options, was quite obvious: D64. D64 files are disk images of
actual c64 disks, and directly compatible with the premier transfer tool,
Star Commander. Naturally, they also have the advantage over, say, straight
PRG files, that the original filename is preserved (c64 filenames can,
unlike most contemporary os'es, contain characters like / since there are no
subdirectories). Ofcourse, this also means extra overhead in that not
everything (in fact, nearly nothing =]) fill an entire disk.

In our choice of a compression tool, we put the emphasis on compression.
While ZIP is the de facto standard archiving tool for most platforms now, it
is also clearly showing its age in the sense of the compression it can
attain. Our choice of RAR as our compression format of choice was easy; it
offers superior compression and is also decompressable over a wide range of
alternative platforms (linux, amiga... not sure about mac). WinRAR for
windows pcs is a very convenient tool to work with for us, and as such is
the ideal choice for the massive compression work that goes into a project
such as this.


...( pOST sCRIPTUM ).......................................................

When this is written, the release of this cd is still a few months away... I
don't think anyone can even begin to comprehend the amazing amount of
slavework involved with checking, converting and repacking 650mb of c64
data... =] But the work is rewarding, and offers a lot of great information
for the main scenery project too, so I soldier on. This text file is being
spread to a few select people, so that they may better understand what this
cd project is all about. I hope everyone will enjoy it, then.

-- menace/spaceballs^boozoholics