Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wuarchive!uwm.edu!linac!att!pacbell.com!tandem!zorch!sega0!mykes From: mykes@sega0.SF-Bay.ORG (Mike Schwartz) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.programmer Subject: Re: Mike Farren Tutorial. Message-ID: Date: 28 Mar 91 07:44:57 GMT References: <1991Mar24.204206.11145@starnet.uucp> <1991Mar26.211403.8981@engin.umich.edu> Organization: Amiga makes it possible Lines: 77 In article <1991Mar26.211403.8981@engin.umich.edu> milamber@caen.engin.umich.edu (Daryl Scott Cantrell) writes: >In article <1991Mar24.204206.11145@starnet.uucp> sschaem@starnet.uucp (Stephan Schaem) writes: >> -HD INSTALABLE: There is absolutly no >> barrier for that for any floppy games. >> Well only piracy. > >Wake up and smell the coffee.. All these wonder-protection-schemes you >game designers come up with don't mean squat to 15-yr-olds with nothing >better to do. Look at Dragon's Lair. Supposedly one of the best-pro- >tected games published (I wouldn't know, not my kind of game..). Not >only was I hearing about cracked versions out before it was even re- >leased, they added insult to injury by adding features to it! The only >thing your floppy protection schemes accomplish is to bug people like >me into not buying your game because it can't be put on my HD. > NOBODY expects to make a game that will never be cracked. The best any one can hope for is 2 or 3 months of being able to get sales before it gets pirated. Once it is pirated, sales drop to ZERO. Once you can put software on hard disk, it will be modemed to all 4 corners of the earth at 9600 baud and you can kiss your sales goodbye. When major software publishers like WordPerfect see dismal sales, they stop supporting the machine. Have you ever heard of a pirate party? This is where a bunch of pirates get together in a gymnasium somewhere and everyone brings their hundreds of pirated disks. You get to copy anything from anyone else that you want. I had the opportunity to read about a big bust they just made in France where they confiscated MILLIONs of dollars in pirated software at just one of these meetings. >>[At this point he babbles at some great length (and very little width) >>about some strange project, assembly routines, the phase of the moon >>relative to Venus, and lord only knows what..] > >I think the most blatant indicator of how lazy most game programmers are >is the neato custom disk-loaders most of them use. Even if you accept >that one track on the disk should be "messed with" for copy-protection >(I don't), trackdisk.device achieves transfer rates approaching the >physical limits of the floppy drive. Yet game designers almost always >"roll their own", and invariably 50% of them will use a CPU loop to time >the raw track read. Is this for the sake of "state of the art" games? >I say it's unadorned laziness. > Your definition of lazy is wrong. Is it lazier to call Open(), Read(), Close() or to write the software to work the drive yourself? It is a lot of extra work that can add a lot of greatness to a product. Again, I will refer you to the routines I wrote. They require 10K of CHIP RAM for as many drives as you can have (4). If you have 4 drives, trackdisk.device eats up 40K. The trackdisk.device routines do not use the DSKSYNC capabilities of the drive. Custom loaders can improve performance by avoiding extra disk revolutions (this is done by timing when you write to the disk in the first place). There is NO EXCUSE for writing poor software whether you take over the machine or not. Commodore has gone out of its way to tell developers how to use the CIA timers instead of the CPU for timing. This is the correct way to do things. Speaking of lazy, I think it is lazy to not want to stick a floppy disk in the drive to play the game. > >-- >+---------------------------------------+----------------------------+ >| // Daryl S. Cantrell | These opinions are | >| |\\\ milamber@caen.engin.umich.edu | shared by all of // | >| |// Evolution's over. We won. | Humanity. \X/ | >+---------------------------------------+----------------------------+ -- ******************************************************** * Appendix A of the Amiga Hardware Manual tells you * * everything you need to know to take full advantage * * of the power of the Amiga. And it is only 10 pages! * ********************************************************