> Matt honestly this has lowered my opinion of you... I thought you knew better.
This hurts, Howard. I have routinely defended you over the years from others around me who have had negative things to say about you. Now I feel a little stupid.
> If made a deal with digital leisure to have a custom "turn-key" version of daphne
> included with their discs I would be all for it and willing to pay for it. DL gets
> some money, you get some money, everybody is happy.
>
> If you were to get permission from DL to sell a special build of daphne that only
> supports their games, again I'd pay for that. It would be on the up and up.
These are the kinds of issues that are cropping up that I am trying to solve.
DaphneLoader could be improved so that Digital Leisure games could be purchased directly from the loader (like Steam). Wouldn't it be nice to not have to have a physical DVD to play these games, while still being legal?
It could also be improved so that other third parties could come in and start offering created-from-scratch laserdisc-styled games (ever heard of SINGE?) and have the loader facilitate delivery of these new games (again like Steam).
It could also be improved so that it could create and bundle up a nice Android or Raspberrry Pi installer that you could conveniently install on said device. It would be really nice and convenient for the end user.
ALL of these improvements cost substantial TIME and MONEY and they have very little to do with preserving memories, they have everything to do with improving the experience for the end user while still protecting the copyright of Digital Leisure (where that applies) which, by the way, also is expensive to do.
(Making DaphneLoader autodownload Digital Leisure games and authenticate to a DVD was expensive development work and had nothing to do with emulation or preservation.)
> It doesn't cost you a red cent to release software you've
> already wrote, so there isn't any reason not to.
That's actually not quite true. Releasing unfinished and/or rough software is actually very expensive. Why? Because it comes with a high cost in the form of technical support and/or bad-mouthing from the community if you won't provide said support. I've learned this lesson over and over and I'm sure mame devs have too.
The lesson is: don't release rough software.
This is why I finally broke down and made DaphneLoader automatically download Dragon's Lair. Because I realized that the software would forever be too hard to use if it didn't.
In the case of RPi, the manual setup process involved is quite complicated today so if I am going to release it at all, I am going to release it so that it "just works". That means probably writing a new from scratch Rpi specific frontend, extending DaphneLoader to facilitate creating some kind of self-extracting RPi archive, and who knows what else. This kind of development work is VERY expensive and has nothing to do with museums, preservation, emulation, or anything else in that area. It has to do with improving the user experience. I'm sorry if you don't see the costs associated here, but I can assure you, they are substantial.
|
Index 
Flat 
Re: My take on the MAME licensing controversy (from Daphne author)
Reply
