Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
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From: Franz Korntner <fkorntne>
Subject: Re: Next Years Competition.
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Date: Thu, 5 Oct 1995 09:51:10 GMT
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David Baggett wrote:

>>But it doesn't run on the Falcon030, so for me TADS is out of reach.
>It doesn't?  This is the first I've ever heard of that.  The program
>doesn't do anything even remotely "incompatible", as far as I know.

It may be that the memory allocation routines can't handle the huge amount of
memory in my machine (20M).

>This brings up a philosophical point, however.  It took me several months
>of spare weekends to get a nice Atari port done.  Once I released it, I got
>mail from exactly one (very helpful) person about it.  As far as I know,
>he's the only person to ever use it.

I know that feeling, but to conclude that only 1 person has ever used it is
rather harsh. I have invested over a year of spare time to get GCC 2.7.0
working on the Atari platform. So far only 2 people have responded, but I know
that there ale a lot more potential users. Because it is free software you get
no feedback, at least not enough to feed your ego. The feedback is minimal even
if you ask them explicitly.

>So from my point of view, there's not enough demand for this port for it to
>have been worth my time.  And yet the supposed lack of support for systems
>like this is held up as a major strike against TADS.

This is exactly the point of view which calls for the release of the TADS
interpreter code. If the code was freely available I could modify it (or at
least try) so that it works properly on the Falcon030. I then would post the
modifications for others with the same problem. As you, David, possess the
source, it now depends solely on your willingness to complete the task but
without the posession of my machine what are the odds that things will work
out. Say you quit supporting the Atari platform, then what? Interactive Fiction
is best enjoyed while playing on the machine you love. Ok, I could play TADS on
a PC, but as thats I machine I actually dislike what do you think the impact
will be on my enjoyment factor.

Also my point of view is that IF should be platform independent, thus
interpreter based, and that the source of the interpreters should be free. The
compiler and story sources is a different story (but I do favour the release of
the compiler source).

In this respect Inform/zip are worthy examples as I was able to expand the zip
interpreter with proportional fonts.

Sorry if I'm raking up old subject, but I'm new to this newsgroup.

Franz Korntner.

