Re: Second Sight news??

[spec@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector)]

In article guenter@student.uni-kl.de (Marvin) writes...

>It's a kind of vicious circle. Users wait for more second-sight
>specific software to appear before they buy this card. Developers
>wait for more cards to be sold before they would write programs
>for them.

    The problem goes beyond that. Even if by magic, every remaining
Apple IIgs owner had a Second Sight installed in their system, you
still would see a lack of software to support it. The firmware is
an uncomplete and buggy mess, which makes writing software for it 
nearly impossible. Sequential Systems not only refuses to address 
or fix the problem, they ignored a well-known programmer who had 
offered to rewrite the firmware for _free_! This is why you only 
see little things written for the card, like graphic viewers or 
patches within existing programs (i.e. ANSI driver in Spectrum). 
Anything more would be too difficult, and even writing these 
"little" things have been no trivial matter.

    Another thing to consider, when talking about vicious circles,
is this "circle" no longer exists. Any remaining developers have 
long given up hope on the Second Sight, and the same can be said 
of many users out there. No one is waiting for anything anymore,
too much time as passed and now it's too late. 

>I think one or two great SecondSight games would boost the sales of 
>this card, too.

    Doubtful, the only thing it would boost are spirits of those
existing Second Sight owners, at least for a short while (I would
stress _short while_, since any games would have to be quite simple
because the SS is fairly slow at moving graphics around. This is 
on TOP OF the GS itself already being slow, a double negative which 
at least could have been avoided with something like the TurboRez).

    To boost sales of the Second Sight would require cutting it's
price right in half (say US$75), a complete (and finished) rewrite 
of it's firmware, a minor hardware revision to remove any glitches
and finally the QDII patch and at least a dozen fully-native SS
aware applications available. How many of those things do you see
happening? The answer is none, except for the QDII patch and maybe
(being optimistic here) a handful of programs to follow it. 

    The sad truth is things aren't going to turn around. The patch
Mike Hackett is writing will make the card more bearable and useful
for it's current owners, it's too late (IMO) to change things now.
Something like the Second Sight belonged in 1989, not mid-1995 when
the Apple II development was disappearing and became pretty sparse.
No one is buying the Second Sight anymore, just those who seek a
solution for hooking up an SVGA monitor to an Apple IIgs (the card
is worthless for that task on an Apple IIe, not being able to do
Double-Hi-Res and other 8-bit graphic modes properly).

>Perhaps a VGA version of a roleplaying game would be a good idea?
>I suggest that Dave Roberts stops playing hide and seek with Dr. Tom
>and continues the development of DungeonQuest for the SecondSight
>card.

    I think it's safe to say you won't see DungeonQuest supporting
the Second Sight, I'm not even sure Dave ever bought an SS card. ;)
In same ways it would be unfortunate if he or anyone else ever did
write an SS version of a game, I and many others would not be able
to see it (only that small handful who own SS boards, which is
probably under 200. Anyone know how many boards were sold?). Two 
years ago I wanted one, now buying an SS is the last thing on my
mind. I've even given up on the idea of even buying one second-hand, 
it wouldn't do anything useful inside my GS and just cause problems
with existing hardware.

    Here's something to look back at, a list of "Expected Third Party
Software Support" for the Second Sight, posted on comp.sys.apple2 
back in 1994: discQuest and discQuest Encyclopedia, GNO/ME, TelCom II,
Lord High Giffer, imageQuant, dungeonQuest, Twilight II. Aside from
Sequential's discQuest having a little GIF viewer built-in on the
side, none of those updates ever happened. I could see maybe Seven
Hill's updating Spectrum Internet Suite to support the SS _after_
the QDII patch has been done, but that's about it (unfortunately
it would still be too slow decompressing JPEG image data, so I 
would question even this being written). 

Mitchell Spector
spec@vax2.concordia.ca