In a message dated 21/07/2004 19:00:38 GMT Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
A slightly late contribution to this debate. Firstly, Text87 could have done far more to improve their sales. £80 plus £25 - £30 for an essential printer driver for a piece of QL software 10 years old is an idiot price. Fred Toussi could have learnt from the PC (printer) world. Give the word processor away for a nominal price and make your money out of printer drivers and font utilities. Secondly, in the last few years, freeware has been far superior to commercial software. Think of the utilities for using the GD2 colours. Thirdly, isn't it time to start facing the realities of the QL community? Do we really need traders any more? They will all vanish anyway within 2 years. Shouldn't we plan for a smaller, but more technically expert QL community that is largely internet based? We do need traders of some sort - although no-one is buying software and there is no hardware to buy currently, except second hand. Traders are seen as a point of first contact to the outside world. Geoff Wicks PS I was once told by a tutor on a training course, "Your hallmark is constructive subversion". Just a thought - if we are to make a software repository with copies of QL software (whether for general download or not), it would probably be easiest if they were stored in a particular format. Most software which is no longer available was only ever released on microdrive. Now FORMAT ram1_mdv1 can be used to make a fast sector copy of a microdrive. Presumably if we have the source code (is this one of yours Tony T ?) then we could amend this to make a direct sector copy from the ram image to a file which could then be opened within an emulator as if it were the original microdrive This might overcome some forms of copy protection (such as used on QL Pawn) and also would preclude the need to amend any of the software to work from disk -- Rich Mellor RWAP Services 35 Chantry Croft, Kinsley, Pontefract, West Yorkshire, WF9 5JH TEL: 01977 610509 Visit our website at URL:http://www.rwapsoftware.co.uk Stuck with ordinary dial up internet connection ?? Read our review of internet accelerators and broadband at: URL: http://www.rwapadventures.com/Services/reviews.html _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.quanta.org.uk/mailing.htm
