That you would. I'm still at a loss on why I never heard back from any of the multiple dealers after sending engineering samples for evaluation. It was fully functional and very simple to use (which was the entire point of the product), there were detailed instructions, the software included detailed AmigaGuide online help. And I was more than willing to produce any form of additional user documentation required. It's not like I was pushing some kind of half-arsed minimal effort hack-up.
I can only think they were concerned about guaranteed supply from a private individual, which I would understand. Maybe there was something around potential licencing issues or a potential for a legal can of worms? While I developed all of the hardware and software from scratch and the ROMs were supplied blank, there was the potential for the product to be used for piracy of licenced software, in the same way that selling a blank EPROM, CD, hard drive or floppy disk can be used to hold illegal copies of software.
That being said, why did no-one bother saying so? Just a "thanks for your hard work, but we can't on-sell this due to xxxxx" would have been great.
Unfortunately I just wasn't in a position to set up online sales, plus I'm far from an expert at such things. At the time I was working six simultaneous jobs, including international Amiga hardware service/support. The FlashROM project evolved out of an idea while developing my own Amiga hardware debugging tools - so I gradually developed that as I had a few hours spare between other jobs. The idea was to deliver something basic initally; then based around demand and user feedback, produce additional hardware such as higher capacity ROM modules and other Amiga hardware. But obviously that never eventuated. You never know, I might pick it up again one day.
While the FlashROM modules were nothing special, the design of the parallel port based programmer was fairly clever and flexible with what it could do - so for example would probably be capable of programming the Kipper2k modules without having to buy an expensive programmer.
Anyway.... Dan, I'll hopefully be out of this icy hole in late October. Planning to resume Amiga hardware service soon after that. Keep an eye on the website.
We did have a long and lengthy discussion on these. I think at the time, dealers were very worried about licencing, plus I was told you were away for a while (6 years?).
Your correct, its an awesome bit of kit. The samples are working well. We have the 4x roms here being used for testing. Did have one or two go corrupt for what ever reason, simple 5 sec wipe and 2 min reprogram and fine again.
It can also take 1MB ROMS fine. Been doing lots of tests since you sent samples.
The software is also great, I personally prefer the text version to the gui.
So if you want any info or feedback, please let me know.
