The long awaited PCMCIA CD-Rom drive for the 1200 is finally here, but
has the hype been worth it.

Well, first impressions indicate yes.  The unit looks the part, and
seems sturdely constructed.

The first thing you notice is the fact that the Zappo is indeed a
totally rebadged Archos unit.  The case says Archos on the back of it,
the instruction manual says Archos on it, and the installation disk has
Archos all over it, so it is safe to assume that it's not a Zappo
invention!  :-)

The case doesn't totally match the A1200's colour, so looks a little out
of place.  If you take a closer look, you can see needless imperfections
like a piece of cork covering up wiring at the back, a piece of silver
paper screwed into the unit to act as an earth, and a very unstable
component on the back of the machine.  These are all external problems,
but many of you wont be bothered about these.  You want to know how the
unit functions..  Well...

The first unit I had blew up, taking the PCMCIA slot with it, which was
rather annoying to say the least.  After speaking to many people, it
appears that my unit was not the only one to have done this.  It seems
like an inherant problem.  Hopefully this matter will be rectified
before the next batch is shipped.

The second unit however performed rather better.  The installation of
the driver software is very simple, and once installed, the unit
performs as well as any normal CD-Rom drive.  Part of the software is
used to allow the booting of CD32 titles.  Upon a reset, the left mouse
button has to be held down, and a requester appears, with options to boot
from CD or to softkick in a 3.1 romfile.  I have not seen this function
working though.

When using the Boot CD option, the system seems to slow down quite a lot
disk wise, but that's no real problem.  I attempted to run all of the
titles reviewed in this issue, and they all worked apart from Simon The
Sorcerer.  Hopefully this will not be a regular problem.

Also included on the installation disk is software for playing audio
tracks and photoCD's.  Both of these are quite basic programs, but do
the job.

All in all, the Zappo unit is quite an adequate solution to the A1200
CD-Rom problem, although I would be hesitant over buying the unit until
Archos actually release theirs.  At the moment, it's release has been
held back due to some technical problems, and one would suggest that the
unit popping as above may be one of them.