From: dmb@case.ai.mit.edu (David Baggett)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: So what does this mean to us ?
Date: 21 Dec 1992 17:22:13 GMT
Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
NNTP-Posting-Host: case.ai.mit.edu

In article <0fq24bj@rpi.edu> oyakea@lib102.its.rpi.edu (Amalaye Oyake) writes:
>1) WILL MR. BAGGET STILL MARKET GAME WORK BENCH OR HAS HE GIVEN UP ?

Really, you can call me Dave.  :)  The fate of GW is still being decided.
I am only one of two authors; the other is Neil Forsyth.  Together we
have to puzzle out whether or not releasing GW now is worth the time,
money, effort, and frustration involved.

>2) IF YOU REPLY, PLEASE STATE IN YOUR HONEST OPINION IF YOU THINK ( note i am
>talking to anybody reading this )  THE FALCON WILL SUCCEED.

My honest opinion?  It has ZERO chance in the U.S.  It has a *slim*
chance in the UK.  It has a *decent* chance in Germany.  I'm only
talking about it not being a loss for Atari here; that's all I can
equate "succeeding" with for Atari.

>3) PERHAPS QUESTION 1) SHOULD BE TITLED CAN MR. BAGGET STILL MARKET GAME
>WORKBENCH ?

Well it's not just mine alone, again.  There are clearly NOT thousands
of people out there willing to pay the cost of a compiler for a game
development system for the ST.  It's a big system, with as much
capability and documnetation required as a compiler.  That means
you have to pay more than fifteen bucks for it.  :)

That doesn't mean it's not possible for it to be profitable.  No
one really knows right now.

It would clearly be *more* profitable in the long-term to port the
system to other platforms.

>4) WHAT DOES ALL THAT HAS HAPPENED, (CONCERNING MR. BAGGETS VISIT TO SV CA.)
>MEAN TO THE AVERAGE ST USER ?

To me, it indicated that Atari has been pretending to be a big computer
company for a long time.  They are now only a shadow of their former
selves, but they have retained one thing: their arrogance.  This
worried me.  Maybe it doesn't really matter to some people though;
small companies have put out great products before.  Atari *could*
still be salvaged; I've emailed Len with various ideas on how I
think it could be done.  But it would require a little bit of
divine intervention as well as a solid, aggressive business plan.
(Point 1: get out of home computers and go back to doing what you
can actually get right: game consoles.)

The tremendous amount of infighting also really bothered me.  The most
arrogant and obnoxious people seemed to bully their bosses while being
the least competent from a technical standpoint.

>6) HOW WERE MR. BAGGETS GAME ROUTINES SUPERIOR TO ANYTHING DONE BY PEOPLE
>LIKE THE BITMAP BROTHERS ( ST DIEHARDS ), OR EVEN JEFF MINTER ?

Well, in the specific instance of the Bitmap Brothers, our routines are
probably faster.  The BB's have done some great games, but their
routines weren't really the fastest around.

The BB's also develop for the Amiga and PC (as well as the Sega and
Nintendo), so I'm not sure I'd classify them as "ST diehards" anymore.

The intention behind GW was always that it should be easy to use
(callable from C), but would be "routines the professionals use." In
other words, the assembly code Neil has written to do the blitting and
scrolling was intended to be as fast or faster than anything in a
commercial game.  Despite the widespread belief among game programmers
that you couldn't make a general-purpose library and still retain the
speed of an all-assembly approach, I think we succeeded.  Neil deserves
the credit for that because he wrote the RDO (Raster Display Object)
manipluating code and the fine scrolling code.  Perhaps if you goad
him on a bit he tell you why his RDO routines are better than the
Bitmap Brothers'.  :)

>7) SO WHAT MACHINES WOULD ONE RECOMEND BESIDES A FALCON ?

In the US, at least, you simply can't beat PC clones for
price/performace ratio.  For those of us who have loved Atari computers
since playing M.U.L.E. on their 8-bits this is a bitter pill to
swallow.

Macs are more expensive but if you can get an educational discount
they're really nice.  DTP support is excellent, and they're rapidly
taking the desktop video market away from the Amiga.  (Macs have
had transparent 24-bit video support for two years now, too.)

IMHO, Amigas are going the way of the Atari computers.  It's just
too difficult to surive in the PC clone/Mac market with mediocre
third-party hardware now.  If someone were to come out with the
1993 equivalent of the Atari 800 (i.e., something that capable and
exciting relative to the current state of the art in home computers),
then they might have a chance.  Like it or not, Atari owners, that
machine was the Amiga in 1985, not the ST.  (Though I note with great
chagrin that the Amiga was actually designed for Atari by the some of
the same folks, like Jay Miner, who worked on the 800.)

I look at the Falcon and the new Amiga machines, and I don't see
anything revolutionary.  (Tossing in a DSP isn't enough, especially
when it should have been a TI34010 graphics coprocessor instead.)

Merely dong sometihng evolutionary won't keep you afloat in today's
"100 million DOS machines and 20 million Macs" market.

Dave Baggett
--
dmb@ai.mit.edu           MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory                  
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