Almathera Systems, Ltd. was one of the first companies on the Amiga which released multimedia CD-Roms for the CDTV and huge collections of Public Domain software on the same media. To get an overview of their productions, here are some descriptions of their most important titles in these fields:
Fractal Universe was a typical multimedia CD with digitized speech, HAM graphics and a nice user interface. It enabled the user to view lots of colourful fractals and even let him create his own ones. The pre-generated fractal images are nice to watch too. Besides, there is a "Mandelbrot Journey" which is a voyage deep into the heart of the famous Mandelbrot set. Information on the discoverers of fractals, their mathematical outcomes and historical aspects complete this excellent CD!
Anotoher multimedia product was their game Prey - An Alien Encounter. Being technically nearly perfect with 100 MBs of in-game graphics and sounds this 3D rescue game could unfortunately not convince many of its reviewers in the international Amiga press. Too often it was criticized the game would become quite bored after running of hours and hours through the gloom catacombs and ferreting lost prisoners. Nevertheless, the games technique was quite impressive at that time!
Now to a field where Almathera had less influence on the CD contents, namely Public Domain collection CD-Roms. Some of their first CDs The 17 Bit Collection for CDTV and 17 Bit - The Continuation Disc were developed for the CDTV and A570 CD-drives. Both CDs were self-booting and after the loading time a nice user menu with all disks and short descriptions appears. As the numerous disks are DMS-compressed on the CD the user has to insert a disk into his drive to which the desired 17Bit floppy disk is extracted to. Later PD CDs released in 1994 and upwards were no longer exclusively developed for the CDTV. CDs in the Demo Series were normally only bootable on the CD32 and had a Workbench 2.x/3.0 interface from which the user can select to watch scene demos, play games or use applications. Almathera did great efforts to make these CDs as compatible as possible. Many programs on these CDs are accessed with their in-house AGA-killing utility to make them runable on high end Amigas.
Also worth to mention that Almathera published the popular Amiga image processor Photogenics up to version 2! This masterpiece of Amiga software is still in development by its creator Paul Nolan and has many pleased users around the world.
In 1997 Almathera ceased trading and therewith its Amiga activities because it became more and more difficult to survive on this shrinking market with less and less customers. Also their developments for Viscorps never released set-top box based Amiga OS became a great financial disaster and contributed to the comedown.
In these days Almathera founder and software developer Jolyon Ralph is still active in the IT business. He runs Mysterious Ways which is a company offering many IT and translation related services. On the firms site there is even a small section dedicated to the Amiga and Mr. Ralphs "old company" Almathera! | 
Fractal Universe
Fractal Universe
Prey - An Alien Encounter
17 Bit - Collection for Amiga CDTV |