(FORTUNE Magazine) – There's no quicker way to feel old than to glance at the pop music charts and realize you've never heard any of the songs. Fortune can't do anything to raise your rock & roll IQ, but the top ten CD-ROMs are another story. PC Data, a market research firm in Reston, Virginia, publishes a monthly list of the best-selling titles. Some impressions:

1. 5Ft. 10 Pak (Sirius Publishing, $29.95). This cheap, ten-disk package is an outrageously good deal that includes some desirable titles as well as a few junky CDs known in the industry as bundle fodder. In the latter category is PC Karaoke, ten silly songs whose words are displayed onscreen as the music plays and you sing along. Also included is an episode from Id Software's Doom, the oogy, ultraviolent arcade game.

2. Myst (Broderbund, $59.95). Ahhh. Here's a rarity in the CD-ROM game arena: You don't have to be a 14-year-old boy to understand Myst's appeal. This luxurious adventure deposits you alone on a mysterious island. As you explore, clues lead you to the conclusion that a magic book holds the key to other worlds. Big plus for grownup players: a wrong move won't get you killed.

3. The 7th Guest (Virgin Interactive Entertainment, $99.99). A lavish fantasy on the order of Myst that takes the player through a spooky house, solving puzzles and observing scenes with human actors that develop the story line. If you don't enter certain rooms of the house "on time," you miss important developments.

4. Star Wars Rebel Assault (LucasArts, $69.95). You're a rebel pilot battling the Galactic Heavy Breather, accompanied by cleverly adapted video and sound effects from George Lucas's movie trilogy. An exciting action arcade game with a fun twist: The actors who play your character have had their images altered to look hermaphroditic so that you won't find yourself cast as the opposite sex.

5. Microsoft Encarta (Microsoft, $99.95). It's tough to choose between Encarta and recent best-seller The New Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia, but chances are you don't have to: You probably got one of them free with your multimedia PC or upgrade kit. Microsoft's version has a snazzy interface, an illustrated time line, and 100 video clips and animations.

6. Microsoft Bookshelf (Microsoft, $69.95). A set of seven reference works linked so you can jump from the dictionary definition of a word to a list of synonyms to an encyclopedia entry. If you can live without the depth of a full multimedia encyclopedia, owning this set will avoid time-consuming disk- swapping.

7. Outpost (Sierra On-Line, $79.95). A science-fiction simulation based on the premise that a meteor is about to turn Earth into space dust. The only hope for the human race is to launch a mother ship and rebuild civilization on another planet. You decide what provisions to take and how to manage your resources -- mess up, and we're all history. Exquisite 3-D graphics further enhance the experience of playing God.

8. Print Shop Deluxe CD Ensemble (Broderbund, $69.95). Not for the technologically inhibited, Print Shop is a serious graphics tool kit for creating greeting cards, posters, letterhead, and the like. Includes piles of fonts, text effects, layouts, reference manuals, and guides.

9. Betrayal at Krondor (Sierra On-Line, $59.95). An animated fantasy role- playing game featuring elves, dwarves, magicians -- you get the picture. Definite teen boy territory that doesn't stray far from its floppy disk roots, incorporating little video and displaying paragraphs of text onscreen to advance the story line. Includes a hint book at no extra charge.

10. Corel Gallery (Corel, $59). While Print Shop offers the tools for designing home-grown posters and stationery, Corel Gallery supplies 10,000 clip art images to spruce up your creations. Gallery works with PC and Macintosh applications, so you can drag the images from the CD-ROM to your word-processor letters or desktop-publishing pages.