after years of digging and research, i finally found the toolkit that was used to make MS multimedia software Encarta, Dinosaurs and Dangerous Creatures. when i fell in love with these programs, i imagined they were built with a rich multimedia authoring environment/IDE like Macromedia Director. e.g. dragging and dropping images, sounds, text and video onto a stage, animating it with keyframes, and then scripting it for interaction. the toolkit used was, as it turns out, a very roughly hewn collection of individual programs. there was no IDE. all of the content was written in RTF files, which were then compiled with links to external resources like wavs and avi's. i cannot imagine what a nightmare this was for the MS Home teams to work with. there is no drag and drop of any kind, no object linking and embedding (OLÉ!), nor animation editor. this is a dog's breakfast of individual programs written by different people. i'm frankly amazed that the MS Homes teams put together such well-designed programs *despite* how painful this toolkit is to use the one thing i can say in its favour is that it has one badass tetricube logo for cover art :D huge thank you to @philpem@digipres.club for archiving this extremely obscure piece of software https://archive.org/details/microsoft-multimedia-viewer-2.0-rips-20210921-1.7z #multimedia #cdrom #retrocomputing #win31