brain wrote:Mike, I apologize that Ultimem failed to impress you.
Taking this at face value: there is really no reason for you to apologize for anything. No harm was done. I merely expressed my disappointment over Ultimem after its design was finalised. And need I to admit it's too easy to criticise after the fact.
Given what you wrote in follow-up, the best outcome would be if there was a lesson we could learn from the mishap. What I think about your post, not strictly in order of how you wrote this:
Without the unified SW, no one really wants the HW, and I can't justify producing the HW if no one will buy it.
That's *really* bad news.
I can understand, that it is not in your interest to quote numbers when they're strictly below expectations. For the moment, I just hope you don't "sit" on a heap of unsold *assembled* cartridges ...
The main problem is that I am a HW person, and I thought that if I get the HW working, some enterprising folks would pop in and take care of the SW. I even sent some dev boards out to a handful of people to get things done. Sadly, little materialized.
That's at least one thing you should think over. On what basis did you give out the dev boards to the people? At least, there should exist a moral commitment to reciprocal service on their side, even if you both hadn't agreed upon a contract for specific work.
You really should call out to those people who received a dev board once again, with a friendly reminder. They owe something to you.
I admit your idea of a mass storage solution with faster transfer speeds is enticing. I honestly did not think about it because I was afraid that folks would never buy a Ultimem+SD2IEC board [...]
Just to remind you: I was not talking about an added-in SD2IEC. Rather, the cartridge would provide a much faster and more capable solution for well-behaving games and applications (i.e. those that use the standard KERNAL calls) than is possible with SD2IEC+JiffyDOS or SD2IEC+SJLOAD, because the transfers don't go anymore over the IEC Bus.
This is not something you get by 'bolting' a SD2IEC to Ultimem (like it's been done with FE3 - there the SD2IEC just gets the power supply from the cartridge infrastructure, but the connection still goes over extra cabling to the IEC port). It would require a completely new design, beyond a (even if very flexible) RAM/Flash-Expansion.
If anything, please reach out to Thomas Lövskog. He had those ideas laid out already in 2011 - sadly enough, his hardware designs went from creeping featurism to hibernation mode. If you two could come to an agreement to relaunch the project, please tell me.
...
I'd like to add the following thoughts, and it's clear to me they might come around somewhat harsh, but here we go:
People seem to accept, that hardware has its price. The hardware took some time to design and manufacture, that is its cost, and the seller has the troubles to test the hardware, package it, look over the financial transfers, etc. and charge whatever he finds appropriate to cover the costs. If it doesn't cover the cost, it's an hobbyist project.
For the most time, the programmers and coders here in Denial released their software without charging the people in any way. Over the years, that might have resulted in many people being cheap when it comes to compensate the programmers/coders for the time they spent programming.
The software does not come without cost! They all take their time to be designed,
programmed and tested: like hardware is designed,
built and tested! If in the past, most software was released here in Denial without asking anything in return, this was mostly because software - contrary to hardware - is easily copied once released. As programmer, you effectively have no control about this once the software is out in the wild. Why adding yourself the hassles obliging those few interested people to cover the software's cost, when most others think they can obtain it for 'free'?
I once gave the numbers for MINIPAINT, which I still consider one of the best pieces of software released for the VIC-20: during development, I spent roughly 100 hours on it. If I actually *needed* to compensate those costs, I'd have had to sell >300 copies at a reasonable price of $50/copy for $150 charged per working hour. Not that I ever had expected to sell that number of copies. The conclusion: I wrote it off as learning project, and otherwise, as spare time activity. Otherwise, if all active programmers here in Denial would take this into account, the software "output" only would have the choice to drop to zero.
For me, I'm nearly at that point. It's just some still inner source of motivation, that I still keep on writing software for the VIC-20. However, as I don't expect any (financial) compensation, I quite the same do not accept any 'orders'. From time to time, I'll release some works, whether or not other people might find use for them or enjoy them. Not more. Actually, there's another combined software/hardware project in my pipeline (tokra, pixel, eslapion, you know what I'm talking about!), and this time I am not going to release it as software-only, even though it was possible ...
just because there wouldn't be any sense to do so! But at least that project will give me a lot new things to learn.
...
So, everything's just fine. Jim - once again - ask the people who got the dev boards, and please contact
TLovskog about GCart 2011. If you two team up, I'll be the third to join in.
Greetings,
Michael