shanzer@mit-caf.UUCP (Mike Shanzer) (07/08/87)
First of all, I am posting this from a friends account. So please no replys through the mail. I'd just like to say some things about copy protection. First of all the Amiga has just as much pirating going on like any other computer. There are 2400 baud boards from Hawaii to New York with thousands of megs of copyrighted software. So far no copyprotection scheme that I know of has worked. I remember the "Wizardry" series for the Apple was said to be "uncrackable" until finally even it was broken. Copyprotection stops the normal Joe Amigan from giving a copy of the new game he just bought to his best buddy. But now with things like Marauder II (Which should be BANNED!) even that is a joke. I have seen a copy of Marauder II with the latest brainfiles, and with all the docs necessary to answer the questions at startup on one disk. A good programmer can just rewrite the part were it checks if the word is correct, to make it so that any word is correct. Or he can just find the part in the program where the program stores the page #, paragraph #, word # and the password itself. Then type them up in a textfile and distribute them with the program. Remember, it just takes one person to break a copy- protection scheme. Now to the argument: "If it's copy protected people are forced to go out and buy the program." That's so wrong! People see a chance to get a program for free, all they have to do is find the diskspace for it and maybe pay a phonebill. So of course they get it. The average pirate is a kid who has maybe $30 to his name. He is not going to gamble that money on a game that might keep him occupied for a couple of hours. In one of those rare cases were some kid gets caught having 50 disks full of pirated stuff, some people say: "That's a loss of $2000 to the software industry." Do you really think that he would have bought even 10% of these if he couldn't pirate them? Especially with the popularity of harddisks and extra ram, more and more people won't buy copy-protected software. The industry knows that, and has started to adjust accordingly. It is their right to copy-protect, it is ours to buy what we want to. Now, on a different subject. I just got back from germany, and I saw a lot of the new amigas. I also have heard from TV that Commodore is selling the Amiga 500 very well. I am very enthusiastic about that, because it means that my Amiga 1000 is alive and will have even more software available for it. I'd really like to hear some figures on the sales. Just how many 500's, 1000's and 2000's have been sold? And how well are they selling currently? I am sure everybody else here would be interested to. Thanks in advance. Mike Mayer -- Mike Shanzer ARPA: shanzer@caf.mit.edu UUCP: mit-eddie!mit-caf!shanzer Unix, Live free() or malloc()