CompuServe Messages

MARCUS, You are certainly right about the software piracy problem. It is still very blatent here in Scotland. At the local `barras' market in Glasgow there are at least four vendors dealing in pirated AMIGA games and all of them do a roaring trade, with large numbers of people waiting in line. They have been `raided' onb numerous occasions by the police but are usually up and operating again the next week. Amazing and quite unbelievable! Early on in the AMIGA's history they used to sell professional software, like ProPage or ProDraw V1 for roughly 10 pounds. That is a considerable saving on the commercial price – but lethal for the company's concerned. And vast numbers of the games being produced at the time. These days they only stock games and do not seem to deal in professional software – at least not openly. I think if one was to ask, however, they would supply it. Recently a vendor was complaining about problems he was having with the ADpro software and was taking in a lot of returned disks from people. It was costing him money. I have talked a lot of my workmates – almpost a dozen into buying AMIGAS and all of them buy the games software from such sources and further swop among themselves these same purchases. Recently they came to me for help in fixing problems some of them were having in getting their computer to work properly. You know what it was? Viruses, There must have been dozens and dozens of infected disks. My contribution to the copy disk activity is to give them all copies of virus killer, which is available on PD. Promiscuous games purchasing from fundamentally unhealthy sources can do serious damage I think. I have not bought a pirated program in years now. If a serious virus ripped through my hard drive now I'd go crazy. It ain't worth the risk and it is also bad for the commercial AMIGA community. IAIN. IAIN.