bloodline wrote:
There is not a game company in the world that would not lisence their old stuff. It's smart business sense.
And what do you project they would ask as a licence fee? a one off payment of $100000 or 3% of sales or 10%? whatever it's not going to be cheap.
THat does not matter at all. If it's 1% or 5% that makes no difference. As long as the end result is the company is profitable selling the retro game devices, it really doesn't matter what royalties you pay... If you're going to project selling 250,000 units of each "model" (game bundle) and you tell Atari "Hey, we'll give you $125,000 to lisence ten of your fiteen year-old games for this." they'll be
very pleased. I'd suspect it would be more like 1% or less for the royalty frankly.
As I keep saying -- the royalty factor for the games is a NON ISSUE. It's pennies per unit, the lower the pennies the better your side was in making the deal.
I couldn't care less how an OLD Amiga chip was manufactured - I don't want to make one. I care how it was designed - and if this means simply emulating, or reverse-engineering each chip to come up with a new single chip encompassing the entire Amiga (lets just stick with an A500 for now) so be it. It's not a hard thing to do - this is 18 year old technology we're talking about. Any off-the-shelf integrated RF modulator would work with this, a cost of production of $0.72 per unit, and there's already 3 to pick from that are used in other retro devices.
First you say you don't care how the new machine is made... then at the bottom you ask who own the IP (Gateway)... but unless you are using the actual Chipset design (which we have already established is useless) you don't need to know who own the IP. You show no understanding here.
You're apparently confused.
The INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY is probably still owned by Gateway and lisenced to Cloanto (and some others). You cannot retail any product where another company owns the IP. Do you know what IP is? Have you ever been anything more than an employee in any tech company? I have.
You sell something where somebody else owns the IP, you find yourself taking all your profits from your sales to defend yourself in court -- or you give up way more to settle. You're better off making the proper lisence fees and royalty deals beforehand.
Why do you keep going on about the age of the technology?
It's 18year old technology, but it was totally custom, it's age does not make it easier to recreate, but harder. Unless you go the Emulation route in which case the IP holder does not need to be involved.
Again - oblivious.
If the IP holder doesn't matter - why does Cloanto exist and retain the lone rights to the ROMS, and make a profit selling their keyed ROMs? Again, do you have any concept of what IP is? Why isn't AUE or Amiga in a Box sold as a retail product? (Because it can't legally be sold as such.)
Age and the technology in the Amiga chipset doesn't make it harder to recreate - it just
possibly makes it impossible to make the OLD CHIPS.
Somehow Tulip has been manufacturing C64 ROMS, CPUs and other chips from old technology. Yes, I realize it's different tech - but its also 5-10 years older... so how the hell did somebody produce those? A time machine? No, they just found the right fab.
I couldn't care less about expansions, networking, hard drives, floppy drives, or anything remotely related to a real computer - I want to make hand-held stand-alone game units that contain 10 games. (Or one that has a propritary cartridge slot that allows you to plug in various game sets).
Hmmm, 10 games... at an average of 2.5 disks per game that's about 25meg + another 2meg for the OS + another 2meg for your emulation software + 1 meg for your firmware... so you'll need a 32meg ROM (maybe more depending on which games you want to use)... which isn't going to be cheap.
The Amiga never used cartridges, so you are totally on your own... how do you get these catridges to boot? How much do the cartridges cost to manufacture? How do you deal with multiple disks on one cartridge?
You're way off in the size of the games. The vast majority of the games came on single 800K disks. Many great games could fit along with 3 or 4 other great games on ONE of those disks. Who said the first Amiga RetroGamer or TVGamer would have to be AGA (where most of the multi-disk games are found)? Maybe it would basically be a 1MB A500 which would give it access to 200 times more games?
Who cares that the Amigas never came on cartridges?! The delivery mechanism for the data ROM (containing the game) doesn't matter in the least regarding how/if it works.
The Amiga games never came on ADFs and they weren't bought on my PC's 200GB hard drive formatted in NTFS yet they still load and play in my Amiga emulator. I can put the same games on a single 32MB USB ram "cartridge" and still load them in my emulator and so can you (you show that you have a mobile emulating device already so WTF is your point here other than to argue for the sake of trolling).
IF - IF - an Amiga RetroGamer was designed with the idea of selling one base unit with the ability to buy game cartridges that contained various compillations, all you need to do is build in the ability to boot any of those games from that storage device (the cartridge). I said proprietary cardridge for a reason - its called piracy. You wouldn't want to make these devices and just use USB ram cards (which retail for about $10 for a 32MB btw), otherwise you'd sell one device and never sell another single expansion product again.
and what about cool, era defining games like "Monkey Island 2" - a game the always brings up the topic of Amiga... every one I know played MI2 on an A500... that has 12 disks alone! I wouldn't buy a box just to play MI2... it would have to have other stuff as well.
Who cares? I don't. I couldn't care less if somebody doesn't buy one of these because it doesnt have Monkey Island. Nobody in the company would care either. I have over 20,000 other Amiga game titles to pick from.
And, who's to say there wouldn't be a single Special Edition Monkey Island cartridge you could buy later on for $5 or $10... I don't think you see the big picture here.
And yes, I do know a bit about manufacturing computer products and I have worked with a few overseas firms getting designs fabricated. (I was head of IT/IS at AST Computers). I also have a pretty solid Amiga background -- I do know what I'm talking about.
You haven't demonstrated any insight into the task you are suggesting :-(
If you say so.
I still say you're responding just for the sake of trolling. You haven't brought up a really good counter argument to why this is a bad idea, or why it would be impossible.
I never said you were talking out of your arse, I simple said that you have not shown that you fully understand what is requried to pull this off.
I couldnt give a damn what you think when you don't offer any valuable opinions other than knee jerk comments that aren't gounded in reality. You certainly haven't shown me anything of value whatsoever in this discussion. All I see is an embittered Amiga user who dreams that his 1994 technology still rocks...
But wait...
I too think it does still rock - and so will 5 million kids who want to play these Amiga games on their TV screens next Christmas.
Though this does highllight soem more problems... some amiga ames used mouse input... some used joystick... others used Keyboard... quite a few used both... then some games wanted the joystick in Port 1 most wanted it in port port2... how the hell do you deal with that? Not to mention copy protections...
EASY.
You only offer games that use a joystick. Wow, what a concept. Think that one through. I mean sure, that will limit the selection to a mere 10,000 titles, but I'm sure there's 10 or 20 worth picking in there. . .
Remember that the source code to these games probably doesn't exist any more!
Who cares? The games on ADF exist, and there is an ample library of 9,000 originals in the room behind me. I don't need the source code... I just need a device that is able to read the data I shove on the game ROM.
And providing you have a lisence agreement with the original game company or the current IP holder for that game, you can easily reverse-engineer the boot loader etc on an existing Amiga or within UAE. I'm sure there's still some talented Amiga hackers out there who would love to be involved in some contract work to modify some old Amiga game software (and remove the "hacked by so and so" loaders etc and replace them with something more sanitized).
There's probably a couple who even read this forum once in a while.
And why do you need that? At best you need the Amiga Name... no one really knows who owns that, though it seems a company called KMOS owns it today. At worst you'll need the Amiga name and the rights to use the OS (assuming you don't use AROS), I think the best place to go would be cloanto and buy it from them.
You can not sell any product where another company owns the Intellectual Property rights. The games, the Amiga technology, the ROMS. End of story.
You need the IP rights to be able to sell the property in any way shape or form (lisenced, outright, etc.). The IP holder most definitely needs to be involved.
So far that looks like Gateway and Cloanto need to be part of the deal (lisence or royalty) - but the question remains... who else?
