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From: ewhac@well.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: More Electronic Arts Bashing...
Message-ID: <3526@well.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 10-Jul-87 02:48:52 EDT
Article-I.D.: well.3526
Posted: Fri Jul 10 02:48:52 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 12-Jul-87 08:57:41 EDT
Reply-To: ewhac@well.UUCP (Leo 'Bols Ewhac' Schwab)
Distribution: na
Organization: The CIA.  Third-world Governments Destabilized While-U-Wait.
Lines: 105

[ Note this this is not necessarily restricted to EA ]

	This is *not* a CP flame, but a flame on other aspects of EA
business practices and the quality of their published products.

	I bought DPaint ][ (unprotected).  I got it home, and loaded it.
Now, I have the noisy flavor of drive, so I can hear everything that's going
on.  I thought the disk was thrashing an awful lot for an unprotected
program.

	So I pulled out my sooper-dooper nifty disk utility, 'fm' (it's on
Fish Disk #36), and looked at the sector allocation.  The disk was
*horribly* fragmented, and the DPaint executable occupied sectors all over
the surface of the disk.

	"This won't do at all," I said, and formatted a new disk.  I then
entered a CLI and said, "copy df0: df1: all".  My working copy of DPaint now
has a *much* cleaner organization, and the head thrashes minimally when
loading.

	This point of all this is that it is *no trouble at all* to have
someone in EA's production department perform this maneuver before
submitting a disk to the duplicators.  I personally take some degree of
pride in my work, and if I had a major commercial product on the shelves, I
would see to it that this was done.  Otherwise, I would whine about it to my
publisher until they A) did something about it, or B) felt guilty.

	More DPaint bashing:  The copy of the DPaint art disk I received had
a brush file on it called "building".  I loaded it, and on the screen
appeared an image that looked nothing like a building.  "Oh well," I
thought, "what they call it is their own business I guess."  Then one day, I
was using a friend's copy of DPaint, and just for ducks, decided to load the
"building" brush to see if it was the same.  I got a different image from
mine, and this one looked like a building.  Doesn't someone at EA check
these things?

	DVideo Bashing:  I don't own this, but I've seen it in operation.  I
know, for example, that the thing is *permanently* fixed in dual-playfield
mode, and you can only get eight colors per playfield.  One day, EA shows up
at a FAUG meeting, hawking its new, upgraded-for-1.2 wares.  The were
showing off DVideo.  I asked, "Is it still restricted to eight colors?"  And
the marketroid responded, "Well, because you have two 8-color playfields on
the screen at once, you actually can have up to 16 colors."  That's funny; I
only use *four* bitplanes when I write a program needing sixteen colors....

	SkyFox Bashing:  Boot up SkyFox.  Listen to the coverpage music.
All of it.  About two-thirds of the way through the music, one of the music
voices runs away from the others and gets about four beats ahead, making it
sound terrible.  Again, this is something that could *easily* have been
detected if EA had a respectable Quality Assurance department.  The music
bug still exists in SkyFox to this day.

	Archon Bashing:  Why do I have to unplug my mouse to play Archon by
myself?  Surely, Jon Freeman could have used the mouse to move pieces
around.  But he chose instead to force the use of a joystick on port one.
Someone in EA should have mentioned this to him.

	Marble Madness Bashing (probably beaten to death, but...):  Why
is the screen left-justified?  Why isn't it centered?  Why wasn't the font
from the coin-op version used?  Since the game boots by double-clicking on a
WorkBench icon, it seems logical that it should be possible to return to the
WorkBench, but that's not the case.  Why isn't there a high-score screen?
Why doesn't my final score from a given game stay on the screen longer?

	General EA Bashing:  EA claims to offer to its artists a state-of-
the-art program development system.  This means an Amiga with a CSA Turbo
rack with the Manx compiler, right?  *Wrong!*  It means an IBM-AT with the
Lattice cross-compiler.

	Without getting into compiler wars, I do not consider this to
be a state-of-the-art development system.  First, you're not developing
native, so you have very little feeling for the machine you're writing
code for.  By using the machine all the time for everything, you get
up-close-and-personal knowledge of what will guru the machine, and what
won't.  You get to know how the machine behaves, and how to write a
product that will obey all the rules.  By developing on the AT, you're
divorced from the Amiga, and just think of it as "The Target Machine."
This is not a good mindset to have when writing commercial
applications.

	Second, debugging is not as thorough as it should be.  Suppose I
write an application native.  I run it.  It seems to work okay.  I exit.  It
seems to exit cleanly.  "Great," thinks I, and I start up some other
program.  The machine crashes.  Obviously I mashed something, and start
looking for the problem.  Now, suppose I cross-develop an application.  I
download (or, in the case from an IBM to an Amiga, upload) the program to the
Amiga.  I run it.  I seems to work okay.  I exit.  It seems to exit cleanly.
"Fine," says I, and I move to another task on the IBM.  Meanwhile, my
application has mashed something in the Amiga, but *because I don't use it
for everything, I'LL NEVER KNOW ABOUT IT.*

	Needless to say, any bug which makes the machine guru will, if
developing native, make that bug get squashed that much faster.

	EA should seriously examine these issues.  It could well be the root
cause of a lot of the, shall we say, "fluff" in their products.

	I could think of other things, but it's getting late.  If anyone
sees any blatant flaws in my logic, corrections would be appreciated.

_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
Leo L. Schwab -- The Guy in The Cape	ihnp4!ptsfa -\
 \_ -_	 Bike shrunk by popular demand,	      dual ---> !{well,unicom}!ewhac
O----^o	 But it's still the only way to fly.  hplabs / (pronounced "AE-wack")
"Work FOR?  I don't work FOR anybody!  I'm just having fun."  -- The Doctor