[rescue] fwd: Linux Foundation Prepares For Microsoft's Legal Action

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Sat, May 19, 2007 at 04:48:32PM -0400, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> Ultimately, the decisions by Warner and then Tramiel doomed both Commodore and
> Atari.  Each ended up with a machine that they didn't understand and never
> knew how to maintain, extend, and support.

IMHO what doomed tha Amiga was the third parties that developed software
for it. Almost all of the games used some sort of floppy disk copy
protection. It was so bad that if you were lucky, the game would load and
run, but often it would not. Psygnosis games were the worst offenders,
one of them "The Killing Game Show" had great graphics and decent action,
but it took 10 minutes to load if it did at all. 

The only thing you could do is buy a "copy anything" program, copy the
disks and use them for the week or so they lasted. Then you had to
make a new set. This got so annoying, that I gave up. 

Then the Amiga 2000 came out and I sold my 1000 and got a 2000. I was
able to get a SCSI card for it and a 105 meg hard drive. The problem was
that nothing except the operating system and microemacs would work on
it. Every game that was available that had floppy based protection would
not load from the hard drive, even if you had the floppy in the disk.

The only way to get around it was to find a person who had a cracked
copy of the game and use it instead of the one that you bought. I 
and I'm sure many other people figured it was not worth buying something
if you had to find/make a pirate copy of it to use it. 

I don't know what anyone else did, I simply did not buy any more games
for the Amiga. I found that games sold for the other computers I had
were just as much fun and a lot less hassle. I don't know if Psygnosis
is still in business or not, but any games they produced that found
their way into my home, were either gifts or from the close out bin.

One of the original things I wanted to use my A1000 for was 
PAL->NTSC video conversion, something that never happened.

I was quite an Amiga fan, I sold them, supported them and even wrote
magazine articles about them.

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM
IL Voice: (07)-7424-1667 U.S. Voice: 1-215-821-1838 
Visit my 'blog at http://geoffstechno.livejournal.com/