jojo@astroatc.UUCP (Jon Wesener) (05/26/88)
I've recently bought several games that while good, aren't great
for really stupid reasons. Mainly the programs have been crippled in
one form or another to defeat pirating and to be able to run in 512k.
A few games that I would normally enjoy I find totally unplayable and
make the Amiga feel like my old TRaSh-80 or worse (an ibmpc.)
I can understand why the author wants to protect himself, but the
software can become almost unusable if every 15-30 seconds you end up
having to swap disks or wait for some resource to be loaded.
1st, let me use my hard-disk! You can still copy-protect a disk
and let the user copy resource files, etc to a hard disk or ram. When
the game starts, check to see if they have the store bought disk and
then do the rest of the loading from the hard-disk. This can't be too
hard to do. Besides, there are more and more of us popping up as
hard drive prices are coming down and it seems a waste not let us use
them.
2nd, Cache often used resources. For example, while strolling
through the city in Bard's Tale, every time you enter a building it
appears to have to load the picture of an empty room. Considering that
this is done almost every other move the player ends up doing a lot of
waiting. Cacheing isn't hard to implement in a well designed program.
3rd, I know a lot of machines only have 512K. BUT, a lot of machines
have more! Have your programs take advantage of it, please. Even if
all you do is copy some of your resources onto a ram disk and do your
normal loading as if it was from df0:. It'll speed up the program
dramatically and make us users very appreciative.
These changes will also make the Amiga look better to potential
buyers who visit friends and watch them play games. The Amiga has been
getting a lot of bad rap mainly because of poor software and not the
machine's fault. If some software makes a machine look and feel slow,
an unknowing user will think it's the machines fault and buy a mac or
a pc.
Comments?
--j
PS. My THANX to all the software authors that already do this.
--
jon wesener
... {seismo | harvard | ihnp4} ! {uwvax | cs.wisc.edu} ! astroatc!jojo
"... for no better reason than our lives have no meaning and
we want to be on television." -- Camper Van Beethovencmcmanis%pepper@Sun.COM (Chuck McManis) (05/27/88)
In article <1034@astroatc.UUCP> jojo@astroatc.UUCP (Jon Wesener) writes: > > I've recently bought several games that while good, aren't great >for really stupid reasons. Mainly the programs have been crippled in >one form or another to defeat pirating and to be able to run in 512k. While I agree that games should be able to take advantage of hard disks and extra RAM, to be economical they must also be able to run in 512K (which is the default A500 memory size). Especially with the cost of memory being what it is, these folks probably won't go to a meg until later this year. > ...For example, while strolling >through the city in Bard's Tale, every time you enter a building it >appears to have to load the picture of an empty room. Considering that >this is done almost every other move the player ends up doing a lot of >waiting. Cacheing isn't hard to implement in a well designed program. In this particular case there are two options. The best is to use Facc to cache the scenes. Hit ^D when Bards tale starts, put a workbench disk with Facc on it in the other drive. Run Facc so that it uses either all your extra memory above 512K or 880K of it (more than 880K is of course a waste, and probably more than 512K is a waste). Then look in the bard's tale startup-sequence to see what name it uses to start the game, and start it up. After a few visits to a room or two you will find the game play to be much smoother. --Chuck McManis uucp: {anywhere}!sun!cmcmanis BIX: cmcmanis ARPAnet: cmcmanis@sun.com These opinions are my own and no one elses, but you knew that didn't you.