hummel@m.cs.uiuc.edu (09/17/89)
"I've always had a soft spot for Commodore, a company that's
trying to do new and innovative things rather than follow the
crowd, and the Amiga remains one of the most interesting
machines around." - Jerry Pournelle in Oct. 89 BYTE magazine
How about that? The whole first quarter of Chaos Manor centers around the
Amiga. Mind you, he spends most of it haranguing Electronic Arts and copy
protection, but I think his comments were generally quite reasonable. I
am sure, though, that he will be receiving plenty of "corrections".
Jerry states that there is "a recent flock of new programs for the Amiga",
though he only talks about Populous and Fast Break 3-on-3, which are both
games. Hopefully, folks like Joanne Dow will continue the wonderful
proselytizing they've been doing with Jerry and he will eventually start
looking more closely at other Amiga products. He ties in copy protection
with the incidence of piracy on the Atari and Amiga (I'm sure he'll be
flamed for this). However, he is fair, and I think correct in noting
that the incidence of copy protection is inversely related to the number
of machines out there.
He certainly succeeds in driving home the users' point of view of copy
protection: Whether publishers like it or not, obtrusive copy protection
is a turn-off. Further, he got caught by Populous getting tripped up on
the '020 in his 2500. He picked up on BIX the bit about needing to boot
up under the 68000, and in the process relays to BYTE readers a modicum
of useful information about using the Amiga.
He discusses how fascinating a game Populous is, and how his son spilled
soda on the disks after getting up early to catch some time playing on the
Amiga, and how it was a pain to get through to someone at Electronic Arts
who could take care of replacing his disk. I'm sure EA will be licking
their wounds for a while, and perhaps his reporting his experiences with
EA's service and copy protection will yield some benefits to all of us in
the long run.
Anyway, I heartily recommend that everyone read Chaos Manor in the October
BYTE when it hits the newsstands. There's definitely some room for us to
present some constructive comments to him, but I think that if we keep a
positive and encouraging tone, we may convert ol' Jerry yet.
< Lionel
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Lionel Hummel 409 Kenwood, Champaign, IL 61821
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign [H] (217)356-6379 [W] (217)333-7408
hummel@cs.uiuc.edu {pur-ee,uunet}!uiucdcs!hummel BIX: lhummel
Portions of this posting include segments of copyrighted material, used for
illustrative purposes without permission.hubey@pilot.njin.net (Hubey) (09/17/89)
In article <7200136@m.cs.uiuc.edu> hummel@m.cs.uiuc.edu writes: > "I've always had a soft spot for Commodore, a company that's > trying to do new and innovative things rather than follow the > crowd, and the Amiga remains one of the most interesting > machines around." - Jerry Pournelle in Oct. 89 BYTE magazine Does Jerry Pournelle have an email adress that can be reached via USENET, BITNET,or NSFnet ?? mark -- hubey@OSultrix.montclair.edu hubey@pilot.njin.net hubey@apollo.montclair.edu VOICE: 201-893-5269 ...!rutgers!njin!hubey