Monthly Archives: June 1998
Visioneer – Pro OCR 100
Although optical character recognition (OCR) software has made some impressive leaps forwards in recent years, it is still not quite perfect. Visioneer is the latest to make an attempt at perfection with Pro OCR 100 and, to be fair, does a pretty good job. Competing against the ‘big two’ packages, from Xerox and Caere, Pro…
Opera Software – Opera 3.21
There are only two Web browsers available for Windows 95/98 – Netscape Navigator/Communicator and Microsoft Internet Explorer, right? Wrong. Quite apart from the plethora of rather basic and limited browsers available from shareware and public domain sources, there’s Opera. Opera is to the big two browsers what a Mini is to a Rolls-Royce. It does…
Acclaim – Forsaken
This game is set in a future in which the Earth is a dead planet, following an unfortunate accident involving some nuclear fissile material and the entire human race. Now the only visitors to our once green unpleasant lands are scavengers mounted on anti-gravity bikes, doing the futuristic equivalent of looting TVs from Radio Rentals….
Sold Out Software – Cannon Fodder, Falcon 3.0, BASS, etc.
Way back in the days before 3D graphics cards were even a twinkle in a hardware developer’s eye, there were, strangely enough, some pretty good games around. Games that were squeezed onto one or two floppy disks, and which consumed just a couple of megabytes of hard drive space when installed. How things change… But…
Canon – CanoScan FB310
It’s not so long ago that flatbed scanners cost hundreds of pounds and were the preserve of design houses and individuals with plenty of cash lying about. More recently, however, the market has been flooded with cheap, yet capable, colour flatbed scanners, some costing as little as £50. It looks as though Canon has decided…
Psion Dacom – Gold Card NetGlobal
Mobile computing is big business, which implies that the market for mobile communications technology is also rather large. Psion Dacom has a healthy share of that market, and looks set to grab more with the launch of this new card, which offers up to five different functions in a conventional PC Card (PCMCIA) or 32-bit…
Network Associates International – PGP Personal Edition
It’s easy to assume that e-mail is secure, but in fact most messages are sent as pure text, with little or no encryption. That means that anybody with the right equipment can read them. This piece of software, based on the highly successful Pretty Good Privacy encryption technique developed in the ‘states, attempts to provide…
Grolier Interactive – Xenocracy
Since the days of Elite on the BBC Micro, space combat games – and especially those with a plot of some sort – have been very popular. Origin’s Wing Commander started it all off on the PC, and subsequent games in that series have been money-spinners ever since. But compared to Xenocracy, the most recent…
V Communications – System Commander Deluxe
The idea of running more than one operating system on a single PC rarely enters most people’s minds. It is often more than enough hassle trying to keep one operating system functioning properly, let alone several. But there are occasions where this would be useful, such as for anyone planning to upgrade their system to…
Adaptec – AHA-2940U2W PCI SCSI adapter
Launched a couple of months ago, the latest model in Adaptec’s range of SCSI cards is definitely not aimed at the home user. Instead, this PCI adapter is intended for use in very high-end workstations and entry-level to mid-range servers. What sets it apart from previous Adaptec SCSI cards is that it supports the latest…