Re: Will someone please send me STM

[jimn8@netcom.com (Jim Nitchals)]

irsman@iastate.edu (Ian Schmidt) writes:

>Yeah, I smell real illegalities here, but I suspect that Nitchals and co have
>inadvertantly adopted the same attitude as Apple Inc about the A2: They Just
>Don't Care.

I've personally spent a great deal of time and money contacting authors
and acquiring rights to their Apple II programs in conjunction with a
future release of STM.  In the meantime, STM is Kevin's property, and
the FTP site is his.  I am not responsible for STM or its distribution,
nor for the arrangement of the FTP site.  However, I can state with
confidence that the use of the software on cassandra is strictly for
testing compatibility wtih STM, a fair use if I ever heard one for
programs no longer being viably marketed or sold in any way.

In addition, I have already opened discussions with fellow employees
at Apple Computer to secure legal rights for Kevin to use the Apple II
ROM images.  The System Disk images are available for $50/year each,
and next week I'll personally walk over to the licensing department
and plunk down $100 to cover the STM disk images for another year.

What Kevin has provided to the Apple II community already, and what
we plan to provide in commercial form, are and will be of great value.
In some cases, I have already succeeded in securing rights where the
author himself did not know how to proceed due to confusion about the
publisher's remaining rights.  That's right: the authors themselves
did not know who had the publication rights to their own product.

In other cases, the author hadn't even realized that their agreement
had lapsed, and that they owned all the rights themselves.  With
such widespread lack of interest in the Apple II programs they wrote,
I hope it'll be clear that our efforts are bringing those programs
back into availability, and without our efforts they would have died.

My name recognition among the old Apple II programming community
has helped, too.  I've been more successful with the majority of
programmers who remembered me than with those who didn't, but they
were *all*, without exception, grateful for my efforts.

You accuse me of a "Just Don't Care" attitude.  That hurts.

If you had a shred of concern for the interest of Apple Computer Inc.,
the Apple II community, or the countless authors who made the Apple II
great, you'd be discouraging the "Hey D00D, where's that FTP site
that has that cool copy of Karateka?!" messages, and encouraging our
efforts to test and debug STM.

>Hmm, I've managed to hit nearly 900 khz once or twice (LC III 4/80, 8-bit
>video), but in general it doesn't make it above 400, and the sound is
>absolutely horrific (bee-eee-eee-eee-eep...get the picture? :)

Performance points on an LC III are useful information.  I only have
a Mac II, a Mac IIfx, and an LCII to test with; Kevin uses a IIsi.
My expertise is in software optimization, and there have been substantial
improvements to the emulator that haven't shown up in public releases
yet.

>Forget that, I wanna stick in a TransWarp, Phasor, and my DataLink 2400 ;)

Maybe in a PowerPC version :)

>-- 
>Ian Schmidt / irsman@iastate.edu / irsman@cs.iastate.edu
>"The look in your eyes as you head for the door is a cold fire" - Neil Peart
-- 
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  "A lot of people say there's too much personal freedom.  When
  personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it."
          - President Clinton as quoted on MTV, April 19, 1994