From: darekm@microsoft.com (Darek Mihocka)
Subject: Re: Last time on this one (really!)
Date: 12 Jan 93 22:22:33 GMT
Organization: BraSoft

In article <3959@isgtec.isgtec.com> ken@isgtec.com (Ken Newman) writes:
>In article <1993Jan8.151744.16471@newshost.lanl.gov> hutch@bellman.lanl.gov writes:
>> Uh, Ken... Did you ever think that maybe Darek built the Gemulator in order
>> to try to make a few bucks?  I think perhaps you are giving him too much
>> credit for his "evil, wicked, mean and nasty" reputation.  :)
>
>Well, sure, but sounds like a small market to me. I think it seemed like
>a double-edged sword, hurt Atari and make money doing it.  :-}


long winded message from the Evil One below...


You're both right! I'm evil wicked mean and nasty and I do it for the money.
But since you're thinking deep thoughts here, why don't you think about
this:

About 10% of the price of a Gemulator package goes to Atari Corporation
for the TOS licence. Considering that their real ST sales are currently
between dismal and pathetic, the extra income from the TOS ROMs may help
push Atari into new areas of profitability! <I'm being sarcarstic!!!>
Although I can't see their profit on a real ST (say, a 1040STE with a
dealer price of about $250) being much higher! They actually might be
making more money each time a Gemulator is sold, although I don't know
their exact profit margins on their hardware.

For 3 years I worked on and sold Quick ST, a product which actually helped
sell ST (or at least kept people from buying a faster machine). About a
year when I no longer had enough time to keep supporting Quick ST, I could
have:
   a) deep six the whole product so it is never heard from again, or,
   b) sell it to the one company that had enough technical knowledge
      to keep maintaining and improving it (i.e. Codehead).
I chose b), which puts a dent in the "evil mean and nasty" argument.

But on the other hand, <grin>, parts of Quick ST are integrated into
Gemulator and the upcoming Gemulator 2.1 update will be bundled with
a special version of it, thus improving the speed and making it more
attractive to buy Gemulator. More points for the "evil mean and nasty"
argument.

But on the other hand again, it has been argued that Gemulator helps
ST developers. After all, who will buy Atari software when it's almost
impossible to buy Atari hardware! There are so few dealers left and
stretched so thin that for the typical computer user it's a hell of a
lot easier to just buy a PC. And PCs are cheaper too. But of course
I have a strong motivation to make people buy PCs. <grin>

Enough deep thoughs.

The original reasons I wrote Gemulator are very simple: 2 years ago people
on bulletin boards and online services started talking along the lines
of "gee, wouldn't it be cool to run ST stuff on a PC" and "gee Darek,
you wrote the 8-bit emulator, how about an ST emulator". I thought about
it for a few months, ported over ST Xformer to the PC as an experiment,
saw that it could be done, and said "sure, I'll do it". Besides, it would
be an excellent way to piss off Atari!!!! <- main motivation <grin> and
because hey, it's a cool project! <- second biggest motivation

If you remember back two years, the original plan was to release Gemulator
as a public domain program by having it use disk based versions of TOS.
Why public domain? See the two reasons above. Money had nothing to do with it.

Then Atari stepped in and said "no way, you can't do that" (they said
the same thing about ST Xformer 5 years earlier, and this time they wouldn't
budge). So thus was born the idea to use a hardware based card in much
the same way that Spectre and Magic Sac work. Hardware costs money to
produce and thus the public domain idea was shot to hell. By the time
the Glendale show rolled around last September, I was over $30,000 in
the hole buying PCs, making boards, buying ROMs, etc.  That's why
Gemulator costs $299.95, because about half of what I charge
dealers for it goes to cover my costs of the hardware and ROMs. If the
hardware was cheaper then I'd be charging less, and actually that's 
already happened because my per-board manufacturing cost is slowly
dropping as I make more and more of them. Expect an under $200 Gemulator
package VERY SOON.

So there you have it. I'm not all that mean and nasty. I'm not getting
terribly rich off the product. Less that 500 of them have been sold so
far, but that's mostly in North America where most people have already
fled the Atari scene. The German, French, and U.K. versions of Gemulator
just started shipping. But I am having a lot of fun with it and so are
most of the 500 or users of it. If someone reading this is upset at me
for doing it, well, tough. Go bark up another tree.

See, there are logical reasons for why things are the way they are.

- Darek

-- 
/--------------------------------------------------------------------------\
| Darek Mihocka, BraSoft, 14150 NE 20th St., Unit 302, Bellevue, WA 98007. |
| Creator of Gemulator, Quick ST, and Xformer. Views expressed are my own. |
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