Boris Fantasy Art CD-ROM

CD-ROM published by Gazelle Technologies, Inc. 1992 (although the image files on my copy are dated 1994 so maybe there was a second edition.)

Contents: 200 images compatible with PC and Macintosh, and viewer software.

PC-accessible images are in three formats:

• 8-bit colour in small size, Windows Bitmap (.BMP) - image size typically about 50 KB
• 8-bit colour in large size, Windows Bitmap (.BMP) - image size typically about 160 KB
• 24-bit colour in large size, Tagged Image File Format (.TIF) - image size typically about 1 MB

Image quality is good, the .TIF files usually being something like 900+ pixels along the long side. The CD purports to have 200 images - whilst it is true that there are that many image files on the disc, there are several errors as follows:

• The file names for Alone and First Love have been interchanged
• The Aquilonian (AQUILON) is duplicated as Warrior (WARRIOR)
• LASTSTND is a duplicate of Leda and the Swan rather than the expected Last Stand
• Similarly, LOCHNESS contains a differently cropped copy of The Lavalite World instead of The Loch Ness Monster Lives
• There are two copies of Quest, the second one being a (slightly) zoomed-in section.

The effect of the last four items is that there are only 196 unique images on the CD. The table below shows all the filenames in order together with representative images of the paintings they contain (not the actual images from the CD.)

There is, unfortunately, no associated text file which gives further image details. I would guess this is true of the Macintosh versions too. The CD predates Windows 95 so the filenames conform to the original DOS (8.3) format.

I can confirm that more recent editions of the CD still contain the same errors although the viewer software appears to be a little more sophisticated than that originally provided.