Reviving CD-ROM material [was: Re: Livecode and interactive video]

[Jeff Reynolds]

Graham,

Having created a bunch of commercial interactive cdroms back in those days of early commercial interactivity, I can say they can be a challenge to mine all the necessary content from them and determine the whole flow chart of content and interactivity. I did this a few times on my own projects in the late days of cdroms and beginning of the web. It was a job to suck all the content out of the encyclopedia and put it into a set of meta files to get sucked into the online system along with providing files that detailed how it all fit together. An I had created the original cdrom and done it in a very template cms way. It took a few weeks to do and this was probably the simplest port that could ever be done due to the content and how I had built the original cdrom and me sucking it out only a few years later. And this was for the encyclopedia part of the disc that was pretty basic article with attached media, glossary and links between articles. When we looked at doing this for the very interactive parts (lots of kids being able to plot various data sets in various ways for them to both see the environmental data itself but also get into analyzing it by plotting various things against each other) it got swiftly daunting to extract and document the interactivity completely. Luckily the online education company determined it was past what was feasible to do online at the time so they let that part drop. 

I had the same experience extracting very interactive exhibits from dual laserdisc systems (in the day the only way to get seamless interactive video was to have two laserdiscs and switch between the two and carefully place your videos on the two discs) to QuickTime and it was a big job to again extract all the content (mostly videos) and document the interactivity. Again I had built the original and was pretty good about file keeping and documentation. Again doable but it was a good pile of work for me and I knew it well having built it.

I’ve looked at migrating some of the educational cdroms we did a decade or so ago that went along with beginning reader story books, but the amount of work, even though done in revolution was just a bit too much for any return it would give other than just doing it. I may still do it some day as the rights owner would probably be fine with it as a freeware presentation online.

Suffice it to say it is possible, just how hard it will be to extract the content from the disc you have is a very hard question to answer. Livecode is so much more powerful today that it’s not a question of programming, it’s getting all the interaction figured out and content out of the system. I can tell you with that huge encyclopedia project (it was $2.7M project in mid 90s) the Mac and PC versions were programmed separately (cross platform systems were not quite there yet for the project) with Mac in HyperCard and pc in Visual Basic. I wrote the Mac version and made HyperCard a shell that was a cms system that would just pull in and article text file and it had a related data file that called out all the links, attached media, and such, so the content is all sitting there in folders that are easy to access and with a little sleuthing you could figure out the data structure probably. But much of the interface graphics and interaction on controls were all buried in HyperCard (mostly as resources). On the PC side they had two hard core Visual Basic programmers that attacked the problem like it was some moon launch (they spent 5x more even though behind the Mac version on production as were handed totally clean and debugged content from the Mac version to suck in, yet they still had 4x more bug sheets than the Mac version, go figure). They had all the data in a big access database that got very cumbersome as it went along. They tried to make access do too much and it ended up being a real issue and they almost went to coding their own database. But all the interface graphics were just a folder of files put together then in vb. So on the pc version the content would be totally inaccessible (yes that’s a pun we used a lot around access), but on the Mac side totally accessible as easily used rtf files.

We had about 5 hardcore programmers at the media company and I know each project many times got build in very different ways due to differences in needs and the evolving tools. I know I would be hard pressed to crack open their projects and extract everything not having been part of building it or the tool potentially to try to get in through an editor.

In the last couple of decades every few years one of the owners (or subsequent owner) of old cdroms I developed has approached me with the idea or resurrecting them in a new fashion. I’ve run the numbers and tried to assess how hard it will be and even doing this at educational rates (bottom of the pay tier, but that’s been a lot of my professional life) it just hasn’t  panned out as feasible. I have one gem that someday I want to resurrect as it’s pretty basic interactivity and low bandwidth, but is one of the best educational games I’ve ever seen with kids on decision making. Content is totally evergreen. But sadly I had a handshake deal with the rights owner years ago but it’s since been sold off and I didn’t have it on paper…

Cheers

Jeff