Quote:
Originally Posted by Retro-Nerd
The Amiga 500+ is a nice machine, but useless without a Kickswitch to 1.3, thanks to a lot crap coded games. Amiga 600? Well... forget about it, it's useless like a dick on a pope.
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Think about this for a moment. You're a game coder is 1988. You're also a psychic, so you know how C= will change the boot sequence, move structures around, and change library functions. Congrats! Your game is future compatible for more than 3 years! Until they change stuff around again.
I'm saying, don't be too hard on programmers, future-compatible is the one thing no-one can be.
My perception is that very few games used fixed ROM addresses, graphics lib structures etc. Maybe it's because most games I played were cracks, where the loader had been replaced and things in general patched to work on whatever machine the cracker was testing it on?
Not following the HRM is no excuse, of course. As for the library coding books -- well they were fuck all expensive and wrote about everything but how to write code that works. In c syntax. c games? I don't think so.
To make a game work, really all you have to do is put a loader after the bootblock, read that with trackdisk.device, and run the loader. ECS had some differences in the copper, but seeing as few games did advanced trickery with the hardware, it's basically only the copy-protection that could cause problems.
If you have to switch kicks running a cracked game, blame the cracker for not being future-compatible. Or not.
Zetr0: It's no great revelation that the software giants make wads of cash despite piracy. On the other hand, it's no surprise developers leave a platform where piracy is disproportionately extreme and other platforms allow them to sell more games due to a smaller proportion of the users copying games. If a 10yo could copy 10 PS games in 30 minutes, PS would be dead as a dodo and devs would have fled like humm,... fleeing fleas!
On the Amiga, the number of copied games vs originals was extreme. I still say almost no PC kids have 200+ copied games for their PC. And with today's game prices (which have always been much higher than, say the price of CD albums) piracy should be even more rampant! But on PC, the number of machines is so much larger, and a healthy chunk of those PC owners buy games, that the market is still big. And on consoles, having to chip them and using torrent and cd burner software pretty much ensures a huge target audience of 6-12yo's free from piracy.
If the devs can't see any way to keep their company going, what are they supposed to do? Work for free on stressful 1 year projects? The days of writing a game with 12K of code and making enough to give each dev member a Lotus were pretty much gone. If they can't keep going, they can't stay and support the platform's users, no matter how much they love the platform or how good new platform hardware is.
Sorry if I go on a bit about this reasoning, but I'm passionate about this subject
I wish we could see again the hectic days of hundreds of small devs making fun games...