EWB Inc, Carlsbad, California is offering the CapaCD Pro tool that increases the storage capacity of CD-ROMs by two to 10 times. It is based on capaCD technology announced earlier this year and contains what the firm calls capagen development tools, a run-time driver, and EWB’s Multipress compression engine. CapaCD-enhanced CD-ROMs can be used on standard CD-ROM drives without any special hardware or software. The CapaCD driver installs from any CapaCD-enhanced CD-ROM. CapaCD Pro includes EWB’s Multipress Installable Codec Interface which enables developers to use third-party compression and decompression technology. CapaCD Pro’s AutoSnoop utility determines all of the data types to be compressed, the appropriate compression algorithm for each, and estimates the total potential size of the compressed CD-ROM after mastering. Following that, capagen generates an oversized file system, and then creates the virtual medium file that allows the standard CD-ROM drive to work with CapaCD Pro compressed files. CapaCD Pro runs on 80286 and higher personal computers with 640Kb RAM or more. Multi-speed CD-ROM drive, Windows 3.1 or higher, and a CD-ROM authoring tool are recommended. CapaCD Pro is out now for $3,000.
