From: bjst@sth.frontec.se (Bjorn Stenberg)
Subject: Re: New hardware reference guide?
Organization: IDK/Frontec - System Design Group
Date: 20 Nov 92 13:22:46 GMT

breese@monet.imada.ou.dk (Bjoern Reese) writes:
> Well, the Hardware
> Ref Guide was partly unusable, and besides only a minority of
> the upcomming coders had a copy, but did that stop them? NO!
> My prediction is that it will not stop them either, if C=
> doesn't release a new Hardware Ref Guide, featuring the AGA
> chips.

I don't know ANYTHING about hacking the AGA hardware. Do you?
I doubt very many people will ever know, and the amount of (seka:-) source 
code available doing that will be veeery small.

This time, hackers will not have an option. If they want to use the new
and fancy AGA chip set, there's only one way to go. If they want to keep
hacking hardware, there's only ECS to use.

I agree with you that old-style hackers will (are already) complain(ing), but
that's not an argument. This is *GOOD* for the Amiga.

Also, the 'demo scene' is biggest in northern Europe, therefore 'we' get to
hear lots more complaining hackers than the US folks do.

> As the AGA chips are made available in low-price
> machines, and hence available to new upcomming coders, there
> will a massive interest in how to program the chips, and
> with or without a Guide, they will try.

...and fail, and give up.
They will propably never get it working 100%, and therefore most hackers are
likely to use the supported OS routines.

> So I say, it is better
> to release a new Guide, in order to set guidelines and to
> prevent fatal errors.

The old hardware guide/ref was to enable people to program the hardware
correctly. This new hardware has no other correct way of programming it than
the OS routines, thus there is no hardware guide.

This new hardware is much more advanced than the old. If people made THAT many
mistakes with the 'easy' hardware, how much shit wouldn't we get if we put
this new hardware in their hands?

> Also, I think this discussion is biased. Most of the people
> on Internet are students at college or university level, or
> employees at a commercial company. This kind of people are
> well educated in programming, and if some of them were raised
> in the demo scene, they most likely have converted (like me.)
> Even though we are Amiga users, I don't think that we
> represent a very wide variety of the common Amiga users.

We don't know CBM wants to target on the wide masses of quiet users playing
games and demos either, do we? I'd say the posters of these newsgroups pretty
much represents the kind of fairly educated users *I* would have as target if
I were running a computer company.

As many people have said, the 'lowlifes' wanting only hot games and cool
hardware are likely to convert to game consoles as these are getting better
and better.

The "fairly educated" people who appreciate the AWESOME system software
shipped with the Amiga, along with it's hardware capacities, are IMHO a much
more 'loyal' group of users than those nagging about new hardware "or I'll
buy myself a cheap PC clone". (Not directed to you!)

> I am not complaining, just trying to set things in perspective.

You do succeed. But is it the same perpective CBM has? What perspective
*DO* they have?

Can't we have a link into CBM Marketing? :-)

		-- Bjorn

       ///  Bjorn Stenberg, Stockholm, Sweden         bjst@sth.frontec.se
      ///  main() { printf(&unix["\021%six\012\0"],(unix)["have"]+"fun"-0x60);}
 \\\ ///  "- Your documentation no longer confuses me, old version!"