Hi,
Lets really talk about pirates, I mean real software pirates who stole from us and really killed the Amiga computer.
The first one I want to talk about is the one that ripped me off, I am talking about Electronic Arts, yea you heard me, when the Amiga first came out I bought their games, like Arctic Fox, Star fighter (I hope I got this name right, it was about a jet that takes off and blasts tanks) anyhow I bought Electronic arts games, this was back in the Amiga Dos 1.0 days, well Amiga upgraded to 1.1 and gues what none of those games worked on 1.1 due to EA's copy protection, during this time I also purchased a Supra scsi card for the A1000, more memory an accelerator and a 20 meg hard drive. Now EA's games wouldn't load on the hard drive due to copy protection and guess what neither would their flag shi_ Deluxe paint, it to was copy protected back in those days. So my vote for Number 1 pirate was Electronic Arts, they under handedly broke the Amiga's back from the get go with copy protection.
Lets talk about all the other companies that used copy protection to guard their disks, like Pschnogsis (yea yea I spelled it wrong) they to made excellent games that if they were let put on a hard drive would have really excelled, but no copy protection was the thing, as if they were stopping software pirates, you know software developers, the greater the protection the harder the pirates try to break it because it is a challenge, they don't buy your software to play the damn game they break it for the challenge and the glory of being the first to break your copy protection.
So now you know why the Amiga really died, it is because software developers copy protected their software so that when Amiga upgraded their Operating Systems the software wouldn't work and couldn't be installed on hard drives.
Think of games like Battle Hawks, The one game where some one goes back to cartoon land (this game was a real pain because when you lost you had to start from the start all over again).
Anyhow how about dungeon master, a great game if you could install it on hard drive, on disk drive just to slow.
These developers I truly blame for the demise of the Amiga, not the software pirates, they just took on the challenge of breaking software protection, and more than likely they were software programmers themselves trying to break their friends code.
Any how I can say that I bought every program that had no protection on it and could be installed on a hard drive. I can't say the same about copy protected disks, if someone broke them and offered them to me I took them just for the spite of my loss of my favorite game Arctic Fox. (Hey it was one of the few games I could beat, and winning sometimes is fun). My code was if it was protected and couldn't be installed on a hard drive then yes I pirated it, if it was protected and could be installed on a hard drive but I had to go through the inconvenience of a code wheel, look up word etc. I bought it when it got old. No protection or on CD I paid. When game I bought and really hate is ZOOL, great game, why did I hate it? Did you ever look at Black lettering on Dark Brown Paper for a code at the age of 50. This is Bullsheet, come on guys gives us older people a chance to, we may be old but a lot of us like playing your game.
smerf
