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From: jnmoyne@lbl.gov (Jean-Noel MOYNE)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: A European point of view (LONG)
Message-ID: <8442@dog.ee.lbl.gov>
Date: 7 Dec 90 00:48:05 GMT
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Organization: Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
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References:<1990Dec6.185453.5684@cbnewsk.att.com> <1990Dec6.201824.13502@Neon.Stanford.EDU>


        Quite good overview of the problem, but I believe one should 
pinpoint a little more at least one aspect: the price in France are more 
like 3 times the American prices. France is an expensive country, and 
that's also true for computers. Amigas are cheaper in Germany, Belgium, 
and UK (at least). And then again, most of the young people buying Amigas 
in France are students, and don't have a lot of money.

       Why do you believe that CBM is selling so much A500 in Europe ? Not 
because Europeans are only using Amigas as a Nintendo and for doing small 
poor programs ! Because they are the cheapest ones !  One year ago, an 
Amiga 500 with 1 Mega of RAM (i.e. w/o external drive or monitor) was 
about $1000 in most of the shops in Paris. You had only a very few places 
where you could buy the set of RKMs, and earlier (maybe 2 years ago) one 
of the only places where you could find the RKM was selling the RKM lib. & 
devs. for around $100. (And the worst is that you know that it's a rip-off 
since you can see the American price tag of $28 printed on the cover).

         So when the average guys has enough in his savings to buy an 
Amiga, he buys it, and then he doesn't have any money to spend on 
software. And if he saves money again it's spare it for buying the 
hardware he really needs (you buy your Amiga, then spare for 6 mounths for 
the memory extension, then here comes XMas time and if you're lucky you'll 
have enough for a second floppy, and then you look at the price of a HD 
(the A590 used to be $1000 when it went out) aso ... ). That's the way you 
end up having certified Amiga developpers actually writing code and making 
programs on a A500 with 2 drives and 1 Meg.

         It's not an excuse for pirating, but it helps to understand why 
there's so much piracy in Europe, and the attitude people have towards it. 
At the same time, sometimes programs won't work with a heavy hardware 
configuration not because the programmer used dirty programming, but 
because he never had any chance to try his program on such a 
configuration. One of my programs wasn't working with a 68020 or 68030 
(clean programming, I was just using the Lattice C 5.00 at the time (-: 
that's more than enough), since I was working on a 500 I couldn't know 
about the bug.

         The rest of the really dirty programming comes from the Commodore 
64. Yes, a lot of people who have an Amiga now had a C64 before in Europe. 
This is especially true in Germany. And the only way to program a C64 is 
to program dirty, but then you could get really a lot out of the C64's 
chips. When all these guys who where puting sprites in the border on a C64 
bought an Amiga, they saw it as a Super-Mega C64. They learned 68k asm 
(which is like a structured programming language in front of the 6502 
asm), saw the price of the RKM libs.&devs. and bought the RKM Hardware 
ref. And they began to program the RKM Hardware ref in one hand, and the 
k-seka assembler on the screen (a real P.O.S. I can't understand somebody 
can use this stuff, even on the C64 we had better!).

         Sure Multitasking was interesting, but it sounded and looked a 
little boring, and boy ! This copper thing is marvelous (C64 guys are 
allways interested by raster ints, the nicest thing the C64 was doing).

         All these guys where programming mainly on a stock A500 (or 
A1000) with sometimes 2 drives and usually no memory extension (1 drive 
and 512k is all you need to program with the k-seka). I don't try to 
excuse them, I just try to explain why they are doing so. They where I 
should say. In addition you should understand that a guy programming a 
game in Europe knows that the great majority of people who will buy and 
use the game won't have anything like a 68020 or a HD.

        And now, I'd like to say it's a little time to stop this European 
Bashing we see here on the net, that's unfair ! You have a lot of 
Europeans programmers who make clean programs, 'european style' has become 
an expression to say dirty programming. The prices are going down in 
Europe now (but are still more expensive than here) and as people will 
have other configurations, the programs will work on these configurations. 
As developpers have better configurations, they will hopefully write 
programs that will work on their own develpmt machine.


           I don't believe too much in methods and solutions to try to 
change that, Commodore is now offering labs with all sort of Amiga models 
where developpers can go and try their programs. On the other hand there 
are still a lot of books you buy to learn how to program the Amiga that 
will teach you dirty programming. I've seen some of these books (mainly 
from Data Becker which is the main publisher for Amiga literature) where 
on the floppy disk given with the book you have 2 versions of the example 
program, one for 1.2 and the other one for 1.3 .... why ? The program does 
direct jumps in the ROM... draw your own conclusions...

         JNM

for(i=0;i>0;)
 printf("I know, my American is awfull!\n");

--
These are my own ideas (not LBL's)
" Just make it!", BO in 'BO knows Unix'