CompuServe Messages

"optimal" machine configuration, but the lowest-common-denominator that we'll support). In 1988 in the Amiga market, the "base-level" machine was an Amiga 500 or 1000, with 512K of memory and 1 floppy drive. At the time, fitting the original Empire on that machine was a tight-fit, but it did work. It worked a lot better on a 1-meg machine, but it would have been financial suicide at the time to require 1-meg. The graphics were mediocre at best. The sound support was poor. The game itself was great! Most of the blame for the shortcomings belong to me – I was inexperienced and misjudged the market's demands for flash over substance. In my defense, I was also under unrealistic scheduling demands (from the publisher) that I believed had more importance than the final quality. Now it's the end of 1992. Looking at the Amiga market, I see the "base-level" machine as an A500 or A600 with 1-meg of memory and two floppy disks. True, there are more accelerated machines out there now than in 1988, and there are more machines with hard disks. However, is the size of the market big enough to be able to eliminate the lower end and still have enough potential customers? What level of machine can I safely target and still have the potential for enough sales to recoup our development costs and for the publisher to recoup their production, marketing, testing, and support costs? And how to I squeeze the PC design and implementation to fit this target machine, without significant compromises? If I could afford a total rewrite specifically targetted for the Amiga, I _may_ be able technically to solve the problems and get it to fit. However, there's no way to justify that level of expense or that use of significant resources. The projected returns are just not there, and those resources could be better (i.e., more profitably) spent on the next MS-DOS project. Emotionally, it's an easy decision for me to make. However, I also <continued>