Anime Hard Drive: Part II

Technology Section

by Hsin Tsao

SS's Ranma 1/2 Screen Saver In last issue's article, I talked about setting up wallpaper and selecting icons for the desktop. This is one of the simplest and quickest way to add a personalized anime element to your work place, but it's not the only thing you can do to spiffy up your computer. Screensavers are another cool way to customize your desktop. In this issue, I'll be focusing on Software Sculpture's Ranma 1/2 Screen Saver, one of the few professional anime screensaver programs available in the U.S. I promise to continue talking about other personal customization tricks in future issues. First though, I'd thought I'd take us back to the last issue and talk once more about . . .

Icons
Last time I only gave the section on icons a couple of lines. Before we get on to the screen saver section, I'd like to go back one more time and add a little bit to the icons section.

Frank Ho's WWW Page offers a good selection of pre-made icons that can easily be incorporate into your own desktop. After downloading the files, you can change the look of your icons by following these instructions:

You'll also notice that there is a link to a icon set (.dll file) for Windows. This icon set actually contains some additional icons that don't appear on the WWW site itself.

Now that you've had a taste of what icon customization like, some of you might now want to create your own personal anime icons. After deciding that I have no artistic talent (well, my girlfriend actually decided this. I still say it looks like a chicken. . . ^_^), I'm probably not the best person to ask if you have questions about design or image manipulation. But, I am a computer man, so I do know of some pretty good programs that will either allow you to make your own icons or have tools to make your job easier. One of the top program for icon creation and editing is Impact Software's shareware program, Microangelo. This cool utility has an great editor, and a bunch of other image manipulation tools. It will let you make regular icons, and for those even more ambitious, animated icons! The link I have here points to a Win95 version, but a 16-bit version is available at Impact's web site if you don't have a 32-bit operating system.

Okay, that's just the basics of adding icons to your desktop. I probably missed some things, but hey, that's what editing is for! ^_^ Now, on to the what I really wanted to talk about in this essay:

The Product Review: Software Scuplptor's Ranma 1/2 Screen Saver
Since I'm a big Ranma fan, I really thought that a professionally released Ranma screen saver CD sounded like a great idea. After all, just imagine what you would get: since it's possible to store over 650 megs of data on one CD alone, you could have hundred of megs of Ranma images and movies right there at your fingertips, without having to wait for slow modem downloads or wasting precious hard disk real estate storing each individual file (I mean, heck, you have to leave room for Diablo and Quake, right?). Therefore, when Software Sculptures announced that they were releasing a Ranma screen saver for Windows and Macs, I immediately went to their web site to check out the details.

System Requirements
I should have known immediately that something was suspicious when Software Sculptures' web site didn't provide any details about the product or the systems requirements. This isn't a good sign when it comes to software. However, theoretically, I think this program should be able to run on any system that can also play quicktime movies. The amount of required hard disk space varies though. Unfortunately for those who want to save disk space, the program won't play the movies directly off the CD, at least in screensaver mode. You have to install it onto your hard drive first for the best performance.
Installation
Installation on Windows 3.x went smoothly and overall I didn't encounter many problems with the program. I did run into one big glitch: the quicktime player that came on the CD was an older version of Apple's Quicktime Player for Windows, so I ended up using the newer version that I already downloaded. (Note: While I didn't have very many problems, it seemed that people did encounter trouble with the program, however, since there were many posts in the anime newsgroups.)

Installation on the Mac was definitely problematic. On a PowerMac 8500, the Jukebox never installed correctly and, in the end, the only way to watch the movies was to run the quicktime player seperately. Whether there is a fix is unknown since SS's website does not have an update/patch section. You'll simply have to send email or call.
What The Program Comes With
There are basically two parts to this program:

The music videos were actually much better than the short animated clips that appear in the screen saver, but again they didn't really live up to my expectations. Fortunately, Viz decided not to redo the songs in English and kept the original Japanese versions (most were songs from the OVAs and movies). However, while the music might have been created in Japan, the videos were definitely not reproduced by Japanese production companies. The videos looks like someone at Software Sculptors simply cut out a bunch of clips out of the existing anime, pasted them together, and put them to music. That's not to say that there aren't some nice sound bites on the CD. As I said, some of the short clips were still funny, and I enjoyed watching the longer video clips that you usually can't find on the Web.

The quality, however, simply wasn't consistent, and the company ended up wasting a lot of space. For example, they had separate directories for Mac and IBM clips that contained identical files -- files that they really shouldn't have duplicated, since they're the same no matter what operating system you have. Worse, some of the music videos were noticably inferior in audio and video quality. Partially, this was due to the company's attempt to cater the program to people with less powerful machines. In other words, if your computer couldn't run movies at high quality, Software Sculptors offered you the chance to see them by installing a lower quality movie. Bad picture quality Unfortunately, their high quality movies weren't really much better in quality than their low quality movies. The size difference between the two different types of files was only a measly 1.5 megs. Divide by 5, and you realize that the individual files differ only by a few hundred K -- hardly enough to see marked improvement in video and audio quality. Of course, you'll have to take my word for this. Software Sculptors turned down my request for permission to put up a few of their clips, so you won't be able to see the quality of the movies for yourself, but as you can see in the image included here, "high" quality wasn't that great to begin with.
Conclusion
I wished that the producers could have put more care and attention into this product. The clips seemed to have beeen hastily thrown together to take advantage of Ranma's popularity. Even if the makers had just picked random clips, they could have at least let the character finish their dialogue. Overall, then, Software Sculptures' Ranma 1/2 Screen Saver gets a 1.5/5 (1 - poor, 5 - awsome) not because of any effort on the company's part, but because I at least got a few good quicktime movie videos from this program. Everything else just takes up space on a CD that could have definitely been put to better use.

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