Path: utzoo!censor!geac!torsqnt!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!lll-winken!uunet!mcsun!ukc!tadtec!bk
From: bk@tadtec.uucp (Brian Kelly)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Awesome! No I am Pi**ed!
Message-ID: <BK.90Nov29222757@tadtec.uucp>
Date: 29 Nov 90 22:27:57 GMT
Sender: bk@tadtec.uucp (Brian Kelly)
Distribution: comp
Organization: Tadpole Technology plc
Lines: 69

I'm joining this thread quite late, however I have a few points to make:

#PONTIFICATE_MODE_ON 

Firstly, some of the postings in this thread have been obnoxious. I'm not 
going to name names, coz if you don't know yourself, then pointing it out
isn't going to help. Please get your act together and stop this "my computer's
better than yours" and "you shouldn't be playing games on that" sort of remark.
The Amiga is a wonderful machine in *all* it's guises and IMHO there are 
far better things about this machine and it's community to talk about than
wasting valuable bandwidth on that sort of noise.

#PONTIFICATE_MODE_OFF

A bit closer to the subject, there really is only one reason that a game won't
run on a all machines and that is copy protection. There is very legal way of
chucking the operating system and running the show yourself. I don't agree
that *all* games should multitask, or should be installable on a hard disk. 
There are certain games that lend to this, Battlechess and Tetris come to mind,
but some games just won't co-exist with the OS and still have their features
intact. Here I'll cite Treasure Trap as an example (coz I wrote it, plug plug
;-)). 
This game, before copy protection, would run on any Amiga I could find,
This included 4Mb 68020 A2000's, it even used give smart remarks if it found
any strange combinations. As soon as the copy protection, which I didn't write,
was installed, it would only run on machines with vanilla 68000's in them.
The reason why copy protection is such a big thing on this side of the Atlantic
is because as soon as a game is released, it appears almost immediately on 
pirated disks. Of course just about no copy protection scheme is going to
stop these people, but ya gotta try something. We even had a game appear on a
pirate disk *before* we had sent the final master to the publishers, that is a 
pre-release version had been spirited away from them and appeared as a cracked
game on one of these compilation disks.

As for co-existing with the OS. The beginning of the game (for the benefit of
everyone but the five people who bought it *sigh*) has a paddle steamer scroll
on to the screen and a little diver jump off it. This is a 50/60Hz scroll with
rippling/fading out reflections. The copperlist for this is quite large, and
needs constant tending to. I honestly cannot see any way of making that sort 
of thing work with exec still running.  Apart from the space problem on
a 512k machine, trying to get a copperlist that uses the wait instruction in
anything apart from explicit mode, to work with MrgCop() (sp?) is pretty 
tedious. I have to admit I didn't try too hard but it seemed like a lotta work
that I could avoid by running the show. 
Apart from that I would definitely have run out of space on a 512k machhine 
without taking over.
 People with expanded systems should bear this in mind, most games are written
so they *must* run on the 512K machines, software houses just cannot afford 
to make special versions of these sort of games for a huge minority of 
machines.  
Let me clarify this by saying I *do* agree it should run on your machines,
and please get off your high horse about going to vanilla 68000 mode, but 
don't flame it about not multitasking, after all a reboot is only
two minutes away and if you can't afford that then you probably can't afford
the time to play the game in the first place.

Unfortunately software protection is here to stay (in Europe anyway) until the
cracking scene realises they are strangling the life out of small software 
houses that produce most of the innovative games we see today and causing
the large ones to go for the License/Hype approach :-(.

To summarise:
              1) All games shouldn't have to multitask.
              2) All games should run on all platforms.
              3) Good (??) copy protection will invariably screw up no 2.
              
I shall now don my asbestos underwear and wait with extinguisher in hand :-)

Brian Kelly