CompuServe Messages

> Moreover, you say it's easy to port things to the Amiga from the PC > given AGA. Well, we DID port games to the Amiga from MS-DOS, and got > slapped in the face repeatedly with cries of, "This is an MS-DOS game > that's been PORTED, this isn't an AMIGA game. We want AMIGA games." The "abuse" had more to do with the quality of the ports. When you have the equivalent of a SoundBlaster card built in, PC-speaker-style beeps are more than a little annoying. Some companies never bothered to use the hardware graphics support to make the graphics as responsive as possible. It was "lazy" ports that annoyed people. I'm also sure that most of the initial Amiga->IBM ports were this way, simply because most people on the IBM didn't have decent sound capability and the developers doing the ports didn't see the need to make the additional effort. > So for all the pains we took to support the Amiga when nobody else was, > we got a lot of abuse. Think about this: You _knew_ people were using your products. Now, the way they _should_ have handled their complaints about your games would have been to take them up with the company first. Maybe people flamed first and asked questions later — which is not uncommon, h**l, I've done it too. There may also have been initial support problems, support people saying "what's an Amiga?" was, and is, a guaranteed method to turn off customers. > What's the incentive for us to support this customer base? Many of us are rather deeply into computers, some of what we crave in out games (Like graceful multitasking — I like to play games while my computer downloads files, posts messages, etc.) are things that IBM users will DEMAND soon. PC-DOS-based games are slamming into the 640K barrier (as if anyone has anything near this much available). Your programmers may need to gain experience in adhering to an OS's expectations. The Amiga OS can be a good introduction to the style of programming needed to deal with OS/2, Windows NT (Now THIS would be a small game market!), and MS's so-called "next generation" DOS — Chicago. AmigaDOS, Windows, NT, Chicago, and OS/2 all are graphically based, event driven environments. The ones here that aren't "Multithreading" are Windows and the Amiga OS, but in AmigaDOS's case, that can be "faked" by spawning parallel processes. The only "unique" feature of the Amiga OS is the concept of a "screen" where an application can display data in whatever resolution and color depth it pleases without mangling other programs' displays. I've seen how OS/2 handles VGA graphics put up by DOS programs, and it happily lets programs render the palette of the master screen unreadable. Not pretty, and something I'd rather not "think about" when I'm working with my computer. What I'm trying to say is that if a programmer can work well in the Amiga environment, he will be better prepared to deal with what IBM and Microsoft will deal out as operating systems in the future.