Okay, now I understand, more or less.  I headed off to the Creative Labs web
site (at http://www.creaf.com ) and poked around at their product offerings.

What that multimedia kit gives you is a real DVD/CD-ROM disk player.  That is,
the CD-ROM portion of the kit *is* both 20X CD-ROM and 2X 2nd generation DVD.

However, DVD is only partly a disk experience.  For real DVD, sound is
involved, too. And the AWE64 card included in this particular kit has a slot
for an optional Creative Labs Dxr?2 Decoder Board that can "understand" the
audio portion of DVD titles, which include movies and games.  Without that
optional board, the disk player can *play* the DVD movie or entertainment disk,
but you won't be able to hear it.

I believe the reasoning behind all this is that there aren't all that many
titles out there yet that use the full DVD (quasi) standard, both audio and
video. So this way, you have the disk part, ready to go, and can purchase the
audio part later, if and when you feel like it.  What I don't know is what is
available on disk in DVD format that is NOT a movie or game.  So I haven't a
clue as to whether this is a good idea or not.

Creative says the add-in board has a suggested retail price of $169.99. For
more info on what the add-in board provides, go to
http://www.creaf.com/mmuk/dxr2-decoder/ .  For more info on the kit you're
probably looking at, go to http://www.creaf.com/mmuk/perf-64/ .

Roxanne Pierce
R2 Systems, San Diego
mailto:[log in to unmask]

On Monday, March 09, 1998 18:30, WINDEE5 [SMTP:[log in to unmask]] wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> I am buying my parents a gift of an upgrade/new CD rom and sound card.  I saw
> a combo deal (Creative Labs) of a Sound Blaster 64 AWE (gold) and 20x CD rom
> that says DVD and in smaller print "ready".  What does "DVD ready" mean
> exactly?  The price was $239.  Thanks in advance.
>
> Wendy Brown