Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!cornell!rochester!udel!mmdf
From: BRENNER_%DULRUU51.BITNET@cunyvm.cuny.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Software Development And Piracy (somewhat lengthy and hot stuff)
Message-ID: <5866@louie.udel.EDU>
Date: 7 Dec 88 19:22:05 GMT
Sender: mmdf@udel.EDU
Lines: 131

GET YOUR FIRE EXSTINGUISHERS READY - QUICK!

Now all that talking about programming clean and orderly and all those
people dooming games authors for taking over the machine and copyprotecting
their games made me really angry.

Let me get back to the start when the Amiga just appeared on the market
and every C64-Kid in Germany dreamed about the new machines...
On the sixty-four incredible
demos introducing pirated software made their journey thru Germany (and
overseas) in less than two days. In fact the demos were the really important
think about the disks, not the software which was often not worth copying.
The goal was always being the "fastest spreader in the world" and for
that the demo had to be the best the computer world had ever seen.

When the price for an Amiga 1000 dropped rapidly here in Germany all those
guys bought this new amazing machines. The first joy whith playing around
with windows and the few existing demos soon faded away and the first
frustration came when the graphics were SOO SLOW when AmigaBasic was used
and it was SO AWFULLY COMPLICATED opening a window and reading the mouse
position. So something like "F*CK the OS" and "The Amiga sure is fast
if only this stupid grapics library weren't in the way!" was debated
thru the "Szene" as the hackers are called here in Germany. A frantic
search for graphics registers, sound and sprite registers began. Copper
and Blitter lost their magic touch when the long awaited hardware manual
was available in Germany. Speaking of myself, I too was full of
joy when my first Text scrolled smoothly over the screen without ANY
flickering that was ALWAYS present when ScrollRaster or things like
that were at work. And then there was digitized sound, of course. An
awfully fantastic thing when you remember the tries on the C64 which
of course nobody had dreamed of when the C64 was introduced but
never were a good quality.

The first intros made their way with copies of DPaint, Marble Madness and
Marauder. And, as NO fast and impressive games came from overseas, demos
(which would never be shown at a Badge Killer Contest) expanded to the
first fast games with lots of digitized explosions, cries and rock
music. America? Nothing! Why? I guess because not profitable enough. German
kids didn't know about how to sell software, so german software firms
made $$$ with cheap software and up till today make. Just think of
Emerald Mine. You don't think it's pure charity why it's so cheap.
The guy from SSI must have experienced that!
So crackers and software pirates turned to programmers overnight.
But none of those had ever hacked on Unix when the standard computer
equipment of a school was a Pet 2001 (Relly!). So no one can blame
those guys for not using multitasking. And - you might believe it or not
- there are programmers here who don't know C - they open windows in
Assembler, do their switch(GetMsg)... in Assembler. And of course those
guys tried to understand what MFM and SYNC was on the Amiga - The C64
had known lots of FastLoaders that loaded 10 times or faster or more
without any additional hardware. So naturally they investigated copy
protections, wrote boot loaders and boot block intros (there were no
viruses then). Multitasking? Why? Do a Supervisor() and a MOVE #$7FFF,INTENA
and WHOOSH - up and away! Memory expansions? Much too expensive! Hard disk?
Never had one on my 64. Programming was done like that:
Use your seka, load the DPaint picture along with sound in memory and save
the whole thing on disk as an object file.

Sure there were great programs from USA that were nice to play (Shanghai
for example) but Shoot-em-ups were terrible when using the OS. Now I
think this mentality still lasts on today and when i think about it
I think it's right. I really HATE software companies which print on
their package: "This software wants 1 Meg at least". Think it over:
program in C => 50 KBytes, graphics (10 pictures, each about 20KBytes)
=> 200KBytes, sound (those samles drain memory, say 10K for each of about
10 samples => 100K, then... playfield allocation, if youre using double
buffering with 3 planes for each playfield => 2*6*8K= about 100K there
you arrive at 450 KBYTES. Just an example. Now, what does your Amiga
show memory when it's booted up? Don't forget to switch on your external
drives and harddisk, the buffers eat A LOT of memory!

Well multitasking. It's great. I love it. I'll never buy the Archimedes
because he hasn't any. I write device drivers. But: A friend programs
on a game and he needs ANY of the 512 KBytes a standard Amiga has got.
So I wrote im a simple DOS that's reading directly from disk without
trackdisk stuff. He really needs the memory. I guess FLT really needs
the memory for DM. Starglider II wouldn't exist if they used MT.
Don't flame about things you never experienced yourselves.

If your game is a neat little strategy game where the programm waits most
of it's time for the mouseclick of the user, ok. If your software is a
text editor that waits for user input, use MT but please use Assembler
for your scrolling routines. Look at all those WYSIWYG programs that
force you to take a coffea break waiting for their insert or remove text
to complete. What do I hear you say? WE NEED a 32bit processor. We
need the Lucas board. I hate saying this but you are no bit more intelligent
than a I*M clone user that cries over Wait states and Norton benchmarks.
Learn to program time efficently.

The multitasking of the Amiga IS GREAT when it's used properly. And it's
great loading a game from Harddisk. But if you are programming much or
if you have big databases on your harddisk somewhen you will reach that
dreaded requester saying "DISK FULL". I also don't understand why you
want to play ASTERIODS or SPACE INVADERS along with doing work on your AMI?
Using Amiga-N or Amiga-M as a sort of Boss Key??? No, come on. If I want
to play games I play games and that with full concentration. If I have work
to do, I don't need the enemy waiting on the back screen.

Copy protection. Useless anyway. No problem for skilled crackers.
But there IS a reason for "copyprotection". Jez San said it.
When you need all memory you write your own loading routines.
Dos uses SO MUCH memory for disk buffers. Intuition eats memory.
Tracksdisk? Can't be used if all else is switched off.
(BTW you gain impressive speed increases). Harddisk? Possible perhaps. But
taking over the machine AND loading with dos - FORGET IT. So it's more or
less a "all or nothing" question. And personally I prefer a fast game that
boots at once from disk and loads in 15seconds over a game that needs
1 Meg, makes your drive seek endlessly between track 40 and track 79 and
makes you sleepy while you play. Games are for everybody. Not just for
professionals who have a 80Meg harddisk, 4 Megabytes of RAM and a
68030 acceleration board got from their organization. Most of you active
networkers are obviously that type! Take time to think about all those
kids. It's easier to turn your machine on and insert the game disk than
to read a large manual of how to transfer the game to your workbench and
that contain JUST ONE CLI command? Even the standard bootblock is
copyrighted (i have heard) so what?

Ok, this has got a bit lengthy but I simply HAD TO STATE MY OPINION to
all that talk that goes on now for days. I know for sure you out there
curse me for such sacrilegs about MT and 'pure programming' but you
should never mix serious software with arcade games. Do you think
Arcade machines multitask? (Oh great, I'll put this in my .signature!)

IF YOU READ SO FAR, YOU MIGHT PACK AWAY YOUR EXSTINGUISHER AND
GET YOUR FLAME THROWER READY!

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===V===    "This message still Beta testing - don't blame me for bugs!" //
  !^!      -Martin (BRENNER_M@DULRUU51.BITNET)  Uni Ulm/F.R.Germany   \X/AMIGA
  ^ ^    ----------------------------------------------------------------------
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