Atlas, a.k.a. ComicBase 12.1, is the next major release of ComicBase.
Atlas brings with it over 75,000 new issues, the integration of hard market data on Gold and Silver Age books courtesy of Heritage Auction Galleries, and numerous performance enhancements and new features—including international support, new sales features, and the ability for Archive Edition users to download cover art in real time.
Thanks to a new partnership with Atomic Avenue, Comics Buyer’s Guide, and Heritage Auction Galleries, we’re now able to do unbiased, reality-based reporting of comic prices which goes far beyond the theoretical “price guide” approach used in the past. Gold and Silver Age collectors in particular should expect some big changes in comic valuations as the new market data is incorporated. ComicBase users with current subscriptions will be able to keep in touch with new market trends in real time, giving them the most accurate comic price information available anywhere.
With Atlas, we’re also taking on the world in a big way, adding in features like support for multiple currencies (with exchange rates for over a hundred currencies updated in real time), country-based searching, currency-sensitive reporting, and translation of the program itself into French, German, Italian, and Spanish.
Our 3-DVD Archive Edition now ships in a slipcased “Giant-Size!” edition with over 205,000 covers built-in—over 20 GB of data in all. Atlas also lets Archive Edition users download comic covers directly from our servers, as well as have the covers of new comics delivered as part of each week’s title and issue update.
In addition to a host of improvements and speed-ups to the program itself, Atlas makes it even easier to buy and sell comics online. Use new “free shipping” options to attract buyers from around the world, or clear out large numbers of comics at once with Atlas’s new “Sets” feature. This feature lets you designate a run, storyline, or other group of comics (even an entire collection!) for sale as a single unit on Atomic Avenue. Users with truly special collections can also take advantage of our partnership with Heritage Auction Galleries to automatically submit their collections for evaluation and appraisal by the world’s leading high-end comic auction service.
Yes and no.
It’s a huge release, but we’re calling it 12.1 since we’re going to be giving it away as a free program update to ComicBase 12 users with a current subscription. If you’re already using ComicBase 12, you don’t need to buy anything or go through a big upgrade process to start using Atlas.
Not at all. In fact, the planning meeting went something like this…
Basically, the plan for ComicBase 12 and beyond is that instead of making you buy a new version of the program to get a renewed subscription each year, all you have to do is renew your subscription whenever it expires (Check your expiration date under File -> ComicBase Statistics), and you’ll be able to download the latest versions of ComicBase for free.
Better yet, we did a lot of work to make it so that ComicBase 12 can be updated “in place” without going through a big “Get out the new disks... install the new version... copy your old data... etc.” process like older version updates required. Even a huge update like Atlas is applied like a simple program patch.
Under the old way of doing things, the title and issue update subscription was tied to each specific version of ComicBase, causing folks to miss out on any time remaining on the old version’s subscription when they moved to a new version. Now, you can renew anytime without any interruption, or missing out on any time left on your subscription.
Archive Edition users will also be able to renew their subscriptions online, as well as download new program updates. Due to the huge amount of picture and movie information bundled with the Archive Edition (over 20 GB!), we’ll also be sending out the new Giant-Size Archive Edition DVDs to anyone upgrading to or renewing an Archive Edition subscription.
Absolutely! Just give our sales folks a call at 408/266-6883 for information and upgrade specials.
You’ll need to upgrade to ComicBase 12 first. When we released ComicBase 12, we specifically designed it to be updateable in ways that previous versions of ComicBase had never been before. In addition, the most current Microsoft operating systems caused problems for older versions of ComicBase. As such, you’ll need to upgrade to ComicBase 12 in order to get all the cool new stuff (including Atlas).
That said, there is some very good news: You can use your old ComicBase serial number to get ComicBase 12 at a huge discount when you order your upgrade online at www.comicbase.com. You’ll also get a year of free updates with the upgrade, and the ability to get Atlas for free when it’s released.
It’s currently in development, and if you’re interested in trying out the most recent development build of Atlas, you can get it from Updates section of the ComicBase web site. Note that development builds are considered extremely preliminary, and are likely to contain both bugs and missing features. If you’re not the daring sort, you may want to hold on until Atlas’s final release, which is slated for early summer.
Check out the ComicBase Betas forum for all the latest news and developments. If you haven’t done so already, it’s also a good idea to register an account on the ComicBase web site at www.comicbase.com to make sure you stay up to date on the latest news about ComicBase.