Elbox announced Spider USB drivers for Amithlon

[bhoggett]

April fool.

[bhoggett]

@Kronos

But it really sounded like a typical Elbox-PR-stunt .....

It is a typical Elbox PR stunt, in that they highlight a feature that their products support and Amithlon does not and also the apparent lack of driver development and support for the emulation product.

...not that I have any inside knowledge about it being a joke. It's just that any announcements made on the morning of April 1st need to be treated with extreme suspicion, specially if they lack important details (in this case, which pci library would it use and which USB stack is it tested with?).

Since the story got an airing here and on the amithlonopen list too, I guess the PR stunt worked.  :-)

[bhoggett]

@platon42

Well, I reckon this is no april's fool. However, I think Kronos is right about most people having USB onboard already anyway. So why not wait for Titan or me (now that I've got a Pegasos, I actually could do some PCI driver development) to write a PCI driver which is not bound to the IMHO overpriced hardware Elbox is selling.

Well, you may well have better info than I have, but my guess was based on logic. Technically, Elbox may well be capable of writing this low-level driver, but in practical terms this means making use of a PCi library. The original Amithlon library would require them to get a SDK off HF, with whom they have very bad relations, or else use the OpenPCI library, which they don't want to support. Both are possible, but unlikely.

Heh, does anyone mind Elbox not having a licence for using Poseidon? Their development keyfile has been revoked and they never registered the program.

Does anyone mind Elbox not stating anywhere that they only provide the low-level hardware driver and that the USB support only available through Poseidon?

Well, you'll notice that I did raise the issue of the USB stack earlier. We're not insensitive to the situation between Elbox and you, you know.

I will continue to treat this announcement as an April Fool until someone proves me wrong.

[bhoggett]

@HammerD

Yes, it's been there all along. (The link should have been posted with the news article IMHO).

Everything I've said about it so far has been said in the full knowledge that the "news" was posted on the Elbox site.

The date is still the 1st of April, and the news item went up prior to 12:00 PM.  To be honest, I haven't seen anything at all to indicate that it isn't an April Fool joke.

[bhoggett]

(replying to myself again... must stop that)

Just to put a little more meat on the "April Fool" theory, the last days of March saw a considerable anti-Amithlon feeling building up on the Mediator mailing list after a remark from the OpenPCI author.  My guess is that this is Elbox's little way at getting back at him and Amithlon users.

Forget it folks, this news article is not real!