The unofficial CMD website - A review

© 2000,2001 Peter Karlsson. As published in Go64/Commodore World issue 7/2000.

http://www.cmdweb.de is an unofficial CMD website, available both in English and German. It's made up of three parts; pages describing CMD's products, a page describing CMD itself, and a section with programs to download.

by Peter Karlsson

Product descriptions

http://www.cmdweb.de/scpu.htm

This is the first thing you see, since the links are placed nearest the top. You can find pages describing all of CMD's major products, the SuperCPU, the FD series, the HD series, JiffyDOS and RAMlink. Unfortunately, the pages don't go so deep in their descriptions, and tend to look like product advertisements.

For those that are not very familiar with the products, this will however describe what the products do. But then again, so does CMD's own pages. There are nice pictures of all products, though.

About CMD

This section - or rather, this page, as it is all on one quite big (30k HTML) page, contains some interesting background information on CMD. It mainly consists of two re-printed interviews, one from Zine64 originally published in early 1997, and one from Commodore Faction published in late 1999, both with Charles A. Christianson. There's also some pictures of the CMD people, the CMD racing car (!), and other related things, and some background information borrowed from the official CMD website.

Downloads

This is the most useful part of the website, containing software related to CMD's product line. Most of it, if not all, is available for download elsewhere, but here they are collected. Currently nine programs available, not that much, but the number seems to be increased regularly.

There's also some animated banners available, for those of you who like them.

My thoughts

If I didn't know this was an unofficial site about CMD's products, I would have guessed it being port of an advertising campaign from CMD. The material doesn't go very deep into the subjects covered, and besides from the download section, there isn't much that would attract people who already know much about the products. And for those who don't know them, I would rather see more in-depth descriptions than this.

Browsers

http://www.cmdweb.de/ in w3m

The site is not very forgiving to different browsers. It does not have any alternatives to its frames, making it look bad in Lynx. w3m does a lot better here, though, and for its defence I'd like to point out that all pictures do have proper ALT tags. When it comes to graphical browsers, I had problems with Opera 3.60 (some JPEGs that wouldn't render), and older Netscape (PNG images). But with the latest Netscape, it works quite well.

As my English is better than my German, I mainly read the English version. You can find a few minor glitches in the language, but nothing big, and not worse than you will see on any other page not written by a native speaker of the language.


This article in Deutsch (German).

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