[feldon34]

The roadblocks to .99K...

As you've noticed, there have been several .99 versions of the Aquarium and the DirectX 8 version of the Aquarium keeps slipping into the future. There are many reasons for this, namely Jim's commitment to the Aquarium running on a much lower set of hardware than Microsoft are willing to accept.

So as a result, Jim has resumed development on .99 versions which use DirectX 6 (he never really stopped) and is trying to get every feature we've been hearing about implemented into the Aquarium. The .99K feature list above is complete except for 3 things. To quote Jim:

''There are really 3 problems, all incredibly slippery. The monitor will not wake up after sleep mode on Windows 2000.

The password protection box is underneath the main screen half the time on Windows 98, making it almost impossible for the User to get out of the screen saver without blindly typing the password.

Pressing Alt-Tab in Windows 98 allows you to bypass the Password protection.''

and ''Fixing any of these problems on some cards or operating systems breaks it on others.''

So until these problems are resolved, Jim is not happy releasing the Aquarium. I asked him about releasing a version without these, but this is not an option.