🚀 go-pugleaf

In the referenced article, warwick@cs.uq.oz.au writes:
>craig@yonder.equinox.gen.nz (Craig Shore) writes:
>
>for the programmer to use paths like "data/foo.pi1" rather than
>"A:/data/foo.pi1".  No hard, really.  Reason?  Who knows - I don't - who
>here posted that "attitude & compatibility" article?  They had the
>reason perhaps.
>
Actually I wrote the original article, but I was more posing a general
question than stating a reason.  From the followups and more thinking
about this it would seem that the main problems are as follows:

PD games/applications:  The programmers can only write the software to
work with what they have available, ie if they have no hard disc and
perhaps have never used one, they will have no way of knowing if their
program will work with a HD, etc for working from drive B floppys etc.
This sort of thing is perhaps excusable, but it would be nice if there
were some simple notes about these sorts of problems, ie what simple
things make the programs more compatible across a broad range of
machines.

Commercial software:  Since these have the *copy protection* problem
and hence frequently boot from the auto folder their ability to run
from HD is strictly limited, in addition numerous programs cannot be
run from the desktop due to needing to run before GEM is activated,
although this really shouldn't be such a problem, apart from the
memory consideration (ie GEM grabs some memory for itself) why do so
many programs fall over when trying to run from the desktop?  For
example on the Acorn Archimedes all software that I am aware of (not a
great deal I'll admit) that has to be run from a floppy, can be run
from the desktop with no problem whatsoever using a sort of *run*
command.  If this could be done for the Atari computers it would be so
much nicer.  These games/applications would obviously then have to
select the screen mode etc for themselves, hopefully having a quit
option that would allow a simple return to the desktop.

Oh well, maybe this is a pipedream, but my original comment was that
too many Atari users just play 'one-time' games, then switch the
machine off and go elsewhere - so the mainstream programmers cater for
precisely these people.

Mark

The official upgrade path for the Cray computers is to buy a new
machine, terrible huh? (just a little joke)