From: gujn@uniwa.uwa.edu.au (Jeremy Nelson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.programmer
Subject: Re: Hardware...
Date: 20 Dec 1992 16:44:17 +0800
Organization: The University of Western Australia
NNTP-Posting-Host: uniwa.uwa.edu.au

>>>This 'using the system' talk is utter foolishness.  If a company's
>>>sales begin to fall, they should be able to determine for themselves
>>>the cause, and not need holy C= looking over their shoulders.
>>Well, C= is interested too in selling Amigas. And selling Amigas is
>>done by selling software for it. This does also include game software.
>Indeed it does include games.  The point, however, that because some
>games are incompatabale, or that many demos only work on 500's, will
>actually cause any harm to the computer market is rediculous.  It will
>cause harm to people who sell shoddy programming, and help those who
>don't.  There is no evidence to show that it would decrease sales in
>hardware as long as there are vendors who sell working software.

That is not true... there is strong evidence that bad programming has
hurt the Amiga market.  Case in point: the existence of the Amiga 600.
The A600 exists because Commodore can't afford to change the CPU speed
because people have been 'optimising' their programs so much. :)  

_That_ hurts machines, because they can't just change the clock rate, make
the Amiga a more competitve low end games machine to fight the console
market and be happy.. because all the games- which is a BIG selling
point (in that market, the games market) - will break.

Furthermore, the fanatic game players can't go out and buy a DSP for
their Amiga and expect it to do radical things, because none of their
games will use it.  Of course system programs will have all the changes
seemlessly if they are programmed properly.


>>>What possible difference could it make?  If a company or individual
>>>is concerned with compatability, he'd better use the OS.
>>
>>If C= is concerned with sellings Amigas and not being limited by the
>>'hacks' the people invent to show off, then they have to make people
>>use the OS. This also applies to game software.

>Facts not in evidence.  There is nothing to show that, because people
>exploit machine specific hardware, future machines will suffer in
>sales.  On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence to show that
>programs exploiting present technology catch people's eyes.

Let's face it, if Commodore had been sufficently ruthless from the
start, and had a bit of good luck, we'd see a very different machine as
the prevelant Amiga.  The dominant amiga would NOT be using a 7MHz clock
speed.  

Of course, we might not have such an active Public Domain, and it might
not be the machine we all know and love.  But it would probably be more
succesful whee it counts in business: it would have been more
profitable, because the place you make money is in business, and no
where else.  All the hardware hacks, and even the game players, don't
stack up against the business market.


>>>If he is just messing around or working on something really whiz, he
>>>needs to hit the hardware.  Doubly so for games, and don't gimme this
>>>'it can be done within the OS' line.  (I know, _lots_ of people think
>>>that it can.  I don't mean to pick on just you.  I'm just tired of
>>>hearing this rediculous 'reason'.)
>>
>>It is the only reason that allows C= to refuse HW documentation.
>And it's invalid.

Personally, I dunno.  But then I'm not a computer programmer.  But the
statement from one of the programmers at Commodore about programming
games made a lot of sense to me... of course he was talking about
actually making money from programming and being succesful, not hacking
for the hell of it.


>>>Hardware hackers don't hurt the AMiga one damned bit.  At most, they
>>>might hurt themselves by not observing proper conventions.
>>
>>No, they hurt those that need software which runs on their machines.

>Where do you find any evidence of this?  People buy what they want.
>Software companies produce, by and large, what people will pay for,
>you know.  Since no one will pay for software that doesn't work,
>software companies won't make it!  If you write word processors, make
>the OS compatable.  If you write shoot 'em up games with whiz bang
>graphics, why the hell _not_ dump the OS?  Most of your market wants
>it that way.  (Okay, so there's _one_ guy out there with a 4000 who
>lusts to play the hottest 3-d 8 bit plane parallax scrolling mega-game
>while running a word processor, balancing his checkbook, and rendering
>an object in 3-d.  Fine.  But most people can't do that.)

Of course, on the Amiga it is simple... every game loads of the floppy disk,
turfs the OS... no worries.  Of course if your machine has a hard disk,
or heaven forbid a non-standard device with it's own software driver,
installing the software there is going to be a problem.  But why worry?
Almost EVERY amiga owner for the next 10 years is going to be running on a 7MHz
machine which boots of an 840k floppy drive... aren't they?


>You are denying the existance of a very real market, one interested in
>performance on a cheap system rather than compatability with the Amiga
>1,000,000.  I can't aford a new machine, and I would prefer that any
>software I buy take _full_ advantage of my limited hardware resources.
>If you have enough money to buy a mondo system, I'm happy for you, but
>most of us scrape by with what we can get.  It's remarkably crass of
>you to suggest that we be denied what _we_ want simply because of some
>baseless marketing theory.

Don't be silly.  

I have an A500.  I take great joy in downloading, unpacking, formatting,
reading, running software, playing music... simultaneously.  My
favourite game is WellTrix... because it multitasks.

Of course, if your game can download, unpack, format let me read
text, run other software, play new music modules, as well as let me play
the game then I'm interested.  But only if it follows the style guide
:), because I like being able to hit TAB in string boxes, use keyboard
shortcuts, use shift-delete in string boxes, move the mouse from the
keyboard, and have access to the inumerable keyboard shortcuts that the
12 or so commodities I run, provide me with. 

>>Currently you have to buy an A500/1Meg/chip-ram-only with a second
>>disk drive to be compatible to all games. And sometimes you have to
>>remove the second drive or disable the memory expansion. Of course
>>this is 70-80% of the market, so the game programmers didn't care.

>Don't buy games from companies that do this.  It's a much better
>solution than denying hardware information to _everyone_ on the basis
>that _you_ can't run Ultimate Lame Game III on your 3000.

That isn't what happens though... the hardware market gets throttled
because no one conformed to the software guidelines.  I refer you to the
problems Atari has had.


Common guys, what sells computers is software which you plug in and
it works.  Simple as that.  If you want a great machine you need to have
a big installeed base, which needs great software.  If software isn't
going to work on the new wonder machines, then people won't buy the
wonder machines, and the hardware ages...
-- 
Jem.  Jeremy Nelson.  gujn@uniwa.uwa.edu.au       :\  =>  :)