First we have a CD-ROM, made in Germany (© Nice Music), called Elvis - The Story of the Undisputed King of Rock & Roll. It contains a MPEG (digitised videoformat) with a sort of documentary about our man, including a fair amount of 50’s stuff and a race through the 60’s and 70’s. Quality of both the documentary itself as well of the images is pretty poor. Most positive we can say about this one is that it contains the full sketch with Milton Berle on the U.S.S. Hancock ("keep buying them records").
Probably the best product so far is Virtual Graceland (© 1996, Elvis Presley Enterprises, published by Highway One Media Entertainment). It gives you the "Graceland Tour" under guidance of an official tour-guide, but you can also wander yourself through and around Graceland. The quality of the stills is poor to average, but the quality of the movies (in QuickTime-format) is fair to good. There are some full versions of songs like the title-track scene of Jailhouse Rock, some NBC tracks and the Burning Love version of Aloha. Also some (outdated) info like Gold-records, the charts and a timeline of Elvis’ life (which is very meagre) can be found on this 2CD-set. Overall this is a fun product. Unfortunately a lot of Windows98 users seem to have problems with it. This product certainly needs an update. With a little patchwork on the program, some extra stuff and more and better info it could be a great product.
The third product we found is "Elvis in Hollywood" (© 1993 Sirius Publishing), on 2CD’s we have the 1993 documentary that was released on homevideo. It is in good quality and after updating the software on the Internet you can even use your 3Dfx-card for full screen.
Fourth in the row is the Elvis Files (© 1998 Sky Creative Media Group). A terrible unfriendly system. A read me tell you how to install two programs (Acrobat and QuickTime) manually and then you'll have to start a "PDF"-file manually. After you managed to do so you'll enter the main menu. We found the FBI-files hard if not impossible to read, that bad is the quality. Furthermore there is a pretty well designed time-line, a small picturebook and a web-listing (with a lot of outdated links). Not really a must, but if you can get it for little, it isn't too bad.
The last one is Elvis - Alternate ’56 (© 1998 FAB Communications), a Japanese CD-ROM with a fair amount of Wertheimer pictures and a screensaver using those pictures. The biggest problem with this product is the fact that the software is in Japanese, of which language we don’t understand too much (not to say nothing). But with a little guesswork you can manage to get through. There is a chance you’ll have a not wanted screensaver installed, which doesn’t recognise your password, but most PC’s have a reset button. For some reason the menu inside the program, for which they used a great picture of E in a bar, was disturbed on our testmachine, but still usable. The quality of the pictures is great, we can’t scan them ourselves like this!. They are saved in uncompressed bmp-format, so they can be used in any editor, which is illegal because of the copyrights.