Re: WANTED: Information on Apple II copy protection

[nathan@visi.com (Nathan Mates)]

In article <1998031804515900.XAA26204@ladder03.news.aol.com>,
Supertimer <supertimer@aol.com> wrote:
>defense of Gus and Bernie, but that does not help PC users.  Someone
>was trying to imply that Nathan could program faster on an emulator.
>Anyone who reads csa2 for more than a week should he's got no Mac.
>To a PC user, a real GS is better...much better.

   That wouldn't seriously help me, Mac or PC. When tracking down
obscure bugs, there's no way I'd want the added level of potential
problems caused by something being an emulator quirk or anything else.
With a ProDEV board, I've been able to trap some mem trashing bugs in
action (latest one from development over the weekend: the AuxWindInfo
struct is written to after the host window is dropped from RAM) much
better. With small asm files, compile time is negligable.

   Right now, I do not need speed. I need better debugging tools, and
I sure don't see those being worked on by anyone, emulators or
not. GSBug and NL may complement each other, but each only has about
35% of the features I want-- and if you're tyring to debug boot code,
you can scratch NL out of that picture.

   Other programmers want some good GUI layout/editing programs
(Foundation src is "free" but incomplete). Others want some OMF utils,
possibly leading to a better compiler/assembler. Those are all
projects requiring a lot of work, and the community at large cannot
use better tools. [If some more people rose up to be programmers to
replace those who've moved on, that'd be MUCH more useful.] But, tools
help make better programs in less time, unglamorous as those are.

   Some will comment that fast Macs, PCs, unix boxen and the like
encourage lazy, sloppy programming. However, a lot of these same folks
seem to turn around and want their own machines to go fast. Is there
a contradiction here? How soon before emulator-only stuff comes out
and is unrunnable on a regular GS? Be careful what you advocate.

>XGS is the better concept, but computing has not gotten fast enough
>to realize it.

   XGS's src code is rotten at the core. Speaking of cruddy slow
designs, it certainly qualifies. I've heard rumors that parts of the
src code were lifted from other projects, causing a fair amount of bad
blood, but I don't care to use or follow that stuff.

Nathan Mates
--
<*> Nathan Mates http://www.visi.com/~nathan/      <*>
# What are the facts? Again and again and again-- what are the _facts_?
# Shun wishful thinking, avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors
# think-- what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? -R.A. Heinlein