‡
                           With love from COMMODORE!!
                         -----------------------------
by
Lithium/THE SILENTS

Commodore  is  known  to  hate the so called "Scene" on their computers from the
very first day on, until some weeks ago, why?  You may ask, well there are a lot
of  things  that  come  from the scene, not always good things like Cracking for
example,  but  Commodore alone would never have been able to make the Amiga what
it is today...  Remember the early days???  They were sooo proud that they could
play  a  sample at decent quality but the music was still sounding pretty lame..
There were no good Music programs.
 
But  after  some  years  of  scenework,  we  have  atleast  a dozen of different
programs,  the  best  must  be  the  Sound-Noise-Protracker  style  programs and
ofcourse  they  were  made  by  scene  guys.   And  at  least 90% of all quality
musicians are part of the scene today..
 
In  the  world of GFX there is not that much action from the scene when it comes
to  programs,  but  in  drawing the scene did the major part of the exploration.
Almost  every  decent graphician of today has his roots in (or is still part of)
the scene...  The scene has done a lot of utilities like rippers, converters,...
But in programming we have got a perfectionist working namely DAN SILVA (the guy
behind  Dpaint!)  None can beat him in making a good drawing program I guess and
besides, it's a hell of a job to do it.
 
Now  the  most important thing the scene has build on the Amiga, CODING!  In the
early  days,  everyone  was  converting  the  64-style to Amiga, so you got some
flying  sprites  with  an  ugly  logo  and  a  scroller.   But  soon people were
discovering the power of the Amiga, this was the best thing that could happen to
Commodore,  the knowledge of these coders was soon used in games, this gave some
superb  action  on  your  screen.  But scene-coders are unstopable, vectors were
invented  and  soon  some  vector-based games apeared.  The quality of games was
rising  fast  but  also cracking is a scene-activity and this was the main thing
that bothered Commodore.  No game was safe for them and untill today there is no
perfect  solution  found,  consoles looked like safe, but it is proven that they
aren't.  Actually this has a positive side for us because if consoles would have
been  100%  safe,  programmers  would  have  left the Amiga and worked for those
consoles only.

Nowadays  Commodore  has found out that without active users like scene guys the
Amiga wouldn't have been so well-sold all over the world.

People  buy  a  computer  because they see superb games at a friends place.  And
without  Crackers  they  wouldn't  see any game, so at last Cracking is good for
Commodore???   Some  softwarehouses are complaining like hell about their sales,
They  are blaming the crackers for this, but if you see their games you know why
they don't sell much!  If one would release a PD game of this quality none would
keep  it  because  the  GFX are ugly, the sound is the 7657858 song with samples
from ST-01 and the game is full of bugs...  Is that what people want???  Compare
this  to  a descent game like for example FIRE AND ICE.  This game features nice
music,  top-coding,  fantastic  GFX  and  well  animated figures.  This games is
better than some console stuff (they aren't paying me for this).  I am sure that
this  game  will be sold good, maybe not as good as games that were sold 3 years
ago,  but  nowadays there are so many games released that it's impossible to buy
all  of  them  now  go out and buy some good game dude, you'll support the right
people with it.

                                             Lithium/TSL
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