marc@ur-univax.UUCP (04/04/85)
I would be interested in hearing from anyone with experience using the HALO graphics package. It looks like a nice package of 150 or so graphics routines and about 16 drivers for various graphics devices. I understand that the driver for the enhanced graphics board will be ready "real soon". I talked to their distributor, Lifeboat Associates, in NYC and they told me that there is a $5000 fee in order to distribute their code with an application that I write !! He also mentioned that Halo would like an option to market the product !! This seems like pretty excessive terms to me. Has anyone had any experience with Halo ??
tsc2597@acf4.UUCP (Sam Chin) (04/07/85)
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That does seem pretty high for distribuition rights. I used HALO about 2
years ago when it was in fairly primitive form and only supported 2
printers. I came off with the impression that it was usable but nothing
fantastic and there were a few bugs such as boundary filling crashing the
system. Then you could distribute your package with the halo subroutines
built in for just the $150 that it cost. If you wanted to distribute it for
all machines which are supported by HALO and all the drivers then you had to
pay something between $5000 and $7000. I'm sure HALO has drastically
improved but I think that those distribuition rights are excessive. There is
one company that exceeds even those premiums. Graphics Software Systems
produces a wonderful graphics subroutine package but it costs $10000 down
and several hundred a month!
If you don't mind doing some programming, you can get the GSX programmers
toolkit from Digital Research for about $350. That gives you interfaces to
all DR languages and *unlimited* distribuition rights to GSX and all their
drivers with your package. I wrote several packages which are being marketed
with GSX. It is also possible to interface other languages to GSX such as
the Microsoft series but you have to write your own interface. I sell such
an interface between GSX and Microsoft Pascal together with a small 2D
graphics subroutine library.
Sam Chin
allegra!cmcl2!acf4!tsc2597
tsc2597.acf4@nyu