Bloodsong, Yes, you guessed right, the compression thingy came with the Matsumi. It doesn't seem to have a name, it's just a tick box for compressed or not when creating a CD in packet format. However, that makes the resulting disk incompatible with any other manufacturer. Without the compression it should be readable by anything else. The software maker is called CeQuadrat. They're sure to have a website somewhere.

I'm normally pretty mean with my money but this time I looked around a bit at all the mail order options, of which there weren't all that many for USB, but in the end opted to pay a little over the odds and bought from a shop I could take it back to if it ever goes wrong. You're right about Win 95/98. The Mitsumi manual says you should only use W98, though in some places it implies it will work with W95 but they won't guarantee it. Do you really need to do a reformat for W98? Surely it will just change the operating system and leave everything else untouched.

bushi's site is at www.spiritone.com/~bushi

Phil, I reckon that whether you give it away for free or sell it, you can protect Metacreations and Zygote (and your own arse (ass in US))if it's pcf encoded. Then you're only giving away/selling your modoifications, not the original mesh. Maz PS Mighty good work

Also try Art Gladstone's site. There's a link from my site. Maz

If my memory serves me correctly Lords Warrior has a site with this sort of stuff. I don't have the URL but it's probably on the Poser links page of Lannie's site which has links to just about every Poser site in the known universe. Just search for Lannie AND Poser and you'll probably find it. There a couple of medieval items on my site, mostly dungeon stuff: http://www.sandylodge.demon.co.uk Maz

There's a scalpel on my site: http://www.sandylodge.demon.co.uk What are you interested in? I might be willing to have a go at making some more stuff. I've also done a hospital bed which is kicking around somewhere on the web. If you're interested I'll put it on the free stuff page. Maz

nerd, you can get round the microscopic size problem by using my Objaction Scaler utility (PC only I'm afraid) to enlarge the obj file by 1000 or more before importing it. You can then scale it down again when you go the other way. It's on my site at http://www.sandylodge.demon.co.uk

Are our technical posts meant to be answered by Edgenet or the community at large? When I post a question to the other Forum I'm not asking Willow, I'm asking the world.

It sounds like modern CD-Rs are more reliable than the one I've got. Maybe I'll ditch it and get a new one. It is possible that mine is troublesome because of all the other hardware I've got hanging off my computer including a home made extender board so I could add three external ISA boards, and maybe the fact that I modified the external CD-R to be internal! The point about magnets and zip disks is valid. My zip disks rarely travel more than a few inches betwen the computer and the shelf beside the computer so they should be fairly safe. Maybe I'd be telling a different story if I took them on the tube (subway).

Glad to hear you folks got it working. I'll now do a fix as soon as I can so that Mover will cope with all the different variants of seed files which share the same name. Then Bloodsong's frog will work with the CD frog as well. This exercise has, however, highlighted a problem with read-only files. For the time being the fix is 'don't use read only files' but I'll try and make the software cope with it properly in future.

Just a word of warning to give the opposite view. I've never had any problems with 100MB Zip disks, but I have had a 640MB CD-R become unreadable. Also I find that my HP CD-R goes through unreliable patches when all I can produce is a big pile of plastic drinks coasters. When it's working CD-R is wonderful, but when it goes wrong you can lose 640 MB instead of 100MB. Hopefully new machines are more reliable than the early one I got.

At last, definite progress. I've identified the line in the program that gets upset when it encounters a read-only file. Unfortunately according to all the manuals I've read it shouldn't get upset as it's not trying to write to the file. I guess it may take a couple of days to come up with a fix. Also, some of you are reporting problems without read only files. That may be a strange quirk of the same problem or it may be a separate problem, only time will tell. Please send details of step by step tests so i can have more evidence to go on.

Could those who got the File Access Denied Problem please do another test. That is to step by step go through the decoding process and let me know at what point the error message comes up. Is it, as I suspect, when you've selected the pcf file from the open file dialog, or is it when you click on the decode button for instance. Also, could you doubly or trebly check that your pcf file hasn't become read-only. Right click on the file icon, click on properties and then make read-only isn't ticked. It's probably best to send these test results direct to me rather than clogging up the forum.# maz@sandylodge.demon.co.uk

However, a slight breakthrough. I've discovered that I can get the "File Access Denied" error message every time if I make the pcf file read only. I have no idea why this should cause the problem because Mover doesn't write to the pcf file (or at least it shouldn't). I'll have to go through the source code line by line to try and fix this one. Also, it's difficult to see how the pcf file could accidentally have become read only on coldrake's machine and Tygerlander reported that her pcf wasn't read only any way. Hours of fun ahead I think.