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From: farren@sat.com (Michael J. Farren)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.games
Subject: Re: Lemmings
Keywords: Lemmings, psygnosis, hard disc installable games
Message-ID: <1991Feb26.042347.26233@sat.com>
Date: 26 Feb 91 04:23:47 GMT
References: <2370@odin.cs.hw.ac.uk>
Organization: SAT
Lines: 145

rwkay@cs.hw.ac.uk writes:
>Branding a game because it is PUBLISHED by a particular company, is
>akin to not buying records pressed by WEA or CBS!, i.e. taking no
>account of the performer. 

Well, if WEA or CBS sold records which could not be used on my B&O turntable
(not a joke - I've got some records which cannot be played on it, due to
transparency fooling the photoelectric sensor on the turntable), I'd be
strongly tempted to avoid their products, too.  In a way, it's YOUR problem -
nobody forced you to go with Psygnosis, and if Lemmings is such a good game,
you should have been able to find another publisher.

>First of all the reasons for making lemmings a copy protected disk.
>To most users this is transparent.

I have no problem with copy protection per se, only with the effects which
often come with it, such as Psygnosis' infamous "we won't run on a 68030"
business.  If yours doesn't do that, more power to you.

>Remember other developers wrote other Psygnosis games, we did not write
>Beast or Awesome.

Perhaps.  But if the copy protection troubles are caused by the developer,
it still doesn't excuse Psygnosis for tacitly approving of the problems.

>Right, to install on HD requires the operating system to be intact.
>The operating system want 100K of CHIP RAM minimum.

No.  The OS wants RAM - it doesn't care whether it's CHIP or FAST, for
the most part.  And with a bit of intelligent programming, you can cut
the required memory WAY down.  It is true that the OS will eat some memory
no matter what you do, but the figure isn't anything like 100K, once you've
eliminated as many memory hogs as you can.  Besides, you know from the
beginning just how much memory you've got to play with - if you really DO
need every single bit of a 512K system, how does that excuse your taking
all of my 5 Megabytes?

>We write our games to utitilise ALL the memory.

Whether or not you need it all, it would seem.

>We write our disk routines to be fast.

You write your disk routines to take up CHIP RAM that otherwise could be
used by the OS, right?

>100K of CHIP is a serious amount of memory to lose.

True - but 412K of CHIP is a serious amount to have to play around with, too.
I'm hard to impress in this arena, having written full (and complex) games
that have operated in as little as 16K RAM, including graphics, sound, and
a LOT of fancy code.  True, this was only an Atari 400, but still...
Whining about how constrained you are by having "only" 412K makes me
snicker.

>To make the game HD installable would require us to use AmigaDOS on floppy.

Not true.  It isn't THAT hard to check the system resources (remember,
autoconfig happens before booting does), and determine the environment you're
running in.  If it's AmigaDOS, you win, because you won't have to load your
"special" disk routines, thus saving that RAM you claim is so precious.
If you're booting from your floppies, go ahead and load your loader.  Take
over the machine.  Do anything you want to - but if you're not, you don't
NEED to do all of those things.  There's precedent, here - several games
(F18 Interceptor comes immediately to mind) that do different things if 
they have extra memory to work with.  You, yourself, admit that you check
to see if there's extra memory, and use it if it's there.  Checking to see
if a hard drive is there isn't any harder, really.

Rule #1 - don't disable it unless you must.  Don't take it over unless you
must.  Don't cripple it unless you must.  And don't believe you must until
it's proven - you're more clever than that.

>This is seriously slower then our routines.

Let me get this straight.  You're seriously contending that your special
floppy loader is faster than my 14ms SCSI disk and DMA controller?  If
so, you've been playing Lemmings too long :-)

>We have deadlines to meet, we have other versions to write. To make
>every version use full OS of all the machines we are using will take
>a lot of time.

Less time than having to "roll your own" for every different machine, I
can guarantee you.  The OS is there for your benefit.  Use it when you
can, bypass it only if you must (see rule #1).

>Every owner of every machine wants a game to make use
>of all the hardware they have. Where do we draw the line?

Only where you have to.  My point is that you didn't have to draw the line
at HD install, but you chose to anyway, and were wrong.  See rule #1, again.

>Extra memory? Supported
>Extra drives? Supported

And kudos to you for that.  I don't mean to imply that you are totally
Evil (I reserve that for the folks from Ubisoft who require you to turn
the damn POWER off to reboot in UNREAL), just slightly misguided in some
areas :-)

>HD installable, do you REALLY need it.

Yes, I do.

>You want your HD being filled with games?

My HD is 27% games right NOW, and I'd put a lot more on it if they would
run.  I'd get a bigger disk if I could put Populous, Archipelagos, Beast,
Unreal, and others on there.

>You sit down to play a game when you have time, or are in the mood.

Which is a lot of the time.  I don't write games just for the money
(I'd be a fool if I did - hey, folks, Cosmic Secret #1 - you're not
likely to make a million bucks writing computer games).

>No doubt some games NEED a HD (Cinemaware for example)

Funny - they used the same excuses you are making now, back in the days
when they didn't do HD install either.  Maybe they now know something
you don't?

>Lemmings does not NEED the benefits of an HD.

Have you ever considered that my HD might need the benefits of Lemmings?

>After saying all this though I have a proposition.
[A hard disk version of Lemmings]

This is a handsome offer, and I thank you for it.  It remains the fact,
however, that selling two versions of a game is going to be less profitable
than selling one version that satisfies everyone.  If you'd included HD
installation in the same version that ran on a 500, you'd be ahead even
more (and so would we).

>We will never compromise on a game for the sake of HD users.

Nor should you.  But you don't have to, you see...

-- 
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| Michael J. Farren                                      farren@sat.com |
|                        He's moody, but he's cute.                     |
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