Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!psuvax1!psuvm!blekul11!ghgaqa4
From: GHGAQA4@cc1.kuleuven.ac.be (Tyberghein Jorrit)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.programmer
Subject: Demo versions
Message-ID: <91031.112859GHGAQA4@cc1.kuleuven.ac.be>
Date: 31 Jan 91 11:27:59 GMT
Organization: K.U.Leuven - Academic Computing Center
Lines: 30

Hi,

I want your opinion. I'm writing a machinelevel debugger for Amiga.
When it is ready I would like to commercialize it. To make my
product better known a demo version would be nice, but I don't really
know how to make a demo version of a debugger. It is very easy
to make a demo version of an editor, simply remove the 'save' option
and the problem is useles while you still can test the power of the
editor (look at the TurboText demo). But my debugger simply does not
have a 'save' command (It has, but this 'save' command is not that
useful). What should I remove, or what should I do to make the
program unusable. You should still be able to see how powerful it is.
I have the following suggestions :

- Set limits on the program (only debug programs smaller than 5 K,
  no debugging on mondays :-), only allow some 100 commands in one
  debug session, ...). The big problem with this approach is that
  these limits are generally easy to remove (for a hacker, he could
  even use my debugger :-).
- Remove some vital things (like the 'trace' command (to singlestep)).
  The problem with this approach is that the debugger looses power.
  Some features will be more difficult to demonstrate.
- Replace all commands in the debugger with dummy commands that generate
  a possible sample of output but not the real output for your system.
  The problem here is that this is a lot of work to program and it is
  more difficult to demonstrate the power of the program.

If you have any suggestions, please mail me or post it in the newsgroup.

        Jorrit Tyberghein