I'm thinking of buying the "70 Years of Trains Magazine" DVD-ROM.
Is this worth the price?
Also, does it run on the latest iteration of Microsoft Windows (Windows 10)?
I thought so and was not dissapointed. What you are buying, of course, is the legacy of 70 years of Trains magazine content. And the ability to not have to put it all on your bookshelf. Trains has been excellent for generations.
Runs fine for me on Windows 8 - should be fine for Windows 10. The search function is not as good as it should be . . . but worlds better than simply consulting the printed index.
I read a lot, but I have not made it through all 70 years. Too much to get my head around. But that means I have got my maximum money's worth out of it, limited by my own capacity, rather than the product.
I consider the price a good value, even though it is high.
Christopher
I've got a copy as well, very nice product. My biggest complaint is that the Mac version of the reader software is ot compatible with the latest versions of MacOS. This makes very leery of disposing of the magazines as support for future OS's may not be maintained, where paper can last for decades.
The only way to make it better is to find all the original photos shown in the magazines and scan them at a much higher resolution for an option to zoom in on the small photos seperately to see all the details. That improvement would have to be for a 75th or 80th anniversary release.
Watch my videos on-line at https://www.youtube.com/user/AndrewNeilFalconer
FYI, I believe that this was recently updated with a 75 years collection.
As for issues, I've found a few scanning errors here and there. Off the top of my head, I seem to recall something of the sort with the Alco PA article from their 'Landmark Locomotives' series from the mid 1990's.
My biggest issue is that some of the content through the years calls for a portrait style display, yet the program lacks a rotation feature to allow it.
So sometimes, I've had to resort to hitting print screen, firing up MS Paint, and pasting the image there in order to rotate it 90 degrees for proper viewing.
erikemI've got a copy as well, very nice product. My biggest complaint is that the Mac version of the reader software is not compatible with the latest versions of MacOS.
The problem is not that the current version is incompatible with 10.10 or later -- they fixed that -- it's that the 'original version' stopped working, and neither Kalmbach nor Apple will admit to anyone that they caused a problem, and Kalmbach refuses to provide a version of the software, or any kind of patch or workaround, to allow the poor saps who paid for the older version to use it. My father has to keep a separate boot partition with the old OS and applications/utilities on it, just to fire up to access the old issues of Trains, and keep crApple from automagically "upgrading" it, downloading e-mail in the wrong application storage while reading, etc. And if he ever has a disk crash, he'd have to restore the whole legacy partition to be able to use the disk set he paid a fairly large amount for.
I do not think Windows users were forced to that indignity, nor do I think things would last long for Kalmbach's DVD collection marketing people were the 'mainstream' customers for the Complete Collection treated in that fashion.
Andrew FalconerThe only way to make it better is to find all the original photos shown in the magazines and scan them at a much higher resolution for an option to zoom in on the small photos seperately to see all the details. That improvement would have to be for a 75th or 80th anniversary release.
I would do this very slightly differently. I think the halftone pictures and the scanned text in the original pages are scanned together, with the 'searchable' text data being OCR'd in a subsequent step. To the extent the original negatives/prints still exist in the files or can be retrieved with appropriate rights 'free to the user'. then scan them at multiple high resolutions and let them be called up when a user clicks on a field drawn around the respective halftone on the magazine page. Might want to have the option to 'load' the high-res images from a DVD or even a streaming connection rather than require gigs of bloatware for people who won't need to have every image on their hard drive eight from install time... or 'download' a selected image's high-res data (and perhaps a selection of related images) to the 'permanent' on-disk instantiation when selected, but leave the rest 'for later'.
Andrew Falconer The only way to make it better is to find all the original photos shown in the magazines and scan them at a much higher resolution for an option to zoom in on the small photos seperately to see all the details. That improvement would have to be for a 75th or 80th anniversary release.
They will probably not issue new DVD's Probably make them available on-line through a subscription, like what Model Railroader has.
I tried to sell my two cents worth, but no one would give me a plug nickel for it.
I don't have a leg to stand on.
DSchmitt They will probably not issue new DVD's Probably make them available on-line through a subscription, like what Model Railroader has.
There were a few hints about issuing new DVD's to fix the MacOS 10.10/10.11 compatibility issues - which is my biggest beef about the DVD's.
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