On 16-Jan-02, Alan Buxey wrote:
> hi,
>
>> But please, don't run out and buy a Radeon card just yet. We may dongle-ize
>> our drivers to some tag we set in Radeon cards we sell, in an effort to
>> reduce P96 piracy. Elbox screwed the P96 guys, as not all Mediator users
>> will
>
> i'd be interested in how you'd do this. and also, could you alleviate my
> fears that we'd be charged vastly unfair prices for the same cards that PC
> and Mac people can use 'freely' (i mean prices above those of reasonable PC
> sellers)

We intend to have the things at a reasonable price. Now consider this includes
the
Radeon card, P96 license, possibly Warp3d commercial license, some fee for my
own time and energy and my partner's time and energy writing the drivers, and
the fact that we have to support the end customer because ATI simply does not
want anything to do with customer support calls from people not using Windows
for the OS. We also have to get something back to help pay for PCI
bridges/motherboards we support ourselves, though at some point P96/Warp3d
teams might help out if they have a bridge we don't and they have the time.
This will add up to some amount more than you see the same PCI card or AGP
card at your local PC superstore. But it will most defintely NOT
be the traditional 10 times the price of the PC retail. We still need to
finalize the license fees involved, but I don't imagine you'll pay more than
US$170 for a US$100 Radeon PCI 32MB SDR card, and it may not even be that
much. I certainly hope for closer to $150 maximum. This is still estimation
time.

> perhaps if people could actually buy P96 with a serial number system
> on CD from you if they wanted to use the Radeon? Then you'd get money,
> P96 people would get money and you wouldnt have to worry about
> the h/w side of things? yes, people can crack ser. no. systems
> but these same people would be able to crack any Radeon dongle system too)

There's also the issue of customer support. What if the Radeon you buy at the
local PC superstore is defective, or works for a few days and quits for some
reason? If you do it your way, ATI ignores you and yells at me for their
wasted time hearing from a non-Windows user. You're screwed out of your
retail purchase price. Buy a replacement at retail, you're up to $200 and
still have zero support. Chances are unlikely this would happen, but it's
possible. Besides, your way you're buying the same thing anyway, only in
seperate boxes from two different places. If we determine that, with the
package offering from us, the total price is $150, then we'll charge $50 for
your CDROM drivers and you pay $100 at a PC store for the hardware. What's
the difference? To you perhaps not much. To us, it's a bit easier to pirate
the CDROM without donglized Radeon hardware so less return on our work, plus
the markup on the card itself goes to the PC store's profits and not to us.
We'd rather have the card markup instead of giving it to a PC store, and have
the slightly decreased piracy. Some customers would like to have someone to
talk to regarding broken Radeon cards, if we sell the card, we support it.
We're not sure if we would be willing to do hardware support for cards we
didn't have anything to do with, final business plan will be sorted out when
we have drivers finished.

It also helps get the right cards into users hands. We might not support both
the AGP 64MB card and the AGP 32MB card for example, if there would be much
involved with sorting out the different memory accessing. Or we may not
support All-In-Wonder versions with all the extras, though I would like to do
that eventually. TV tuner would be nice, (Still disappointed Village Tronic
never made the announced NTSC PalomaIV). but will be unusable for a while,
and there are differences in talking to them compared to "regular" versions
without the TV tuner and stuff. Extra chips and all that to deal with... No
sense in dealing with people complaining that All-In-Wonder or some other
card we don't have doesn't work when we haven't tested or even tried to get
that particular model working... I can't afford to buy every single Radeon
model out there, so we'll choose a few to support, the PCI Radeon 32MB SDR
for starters, an AGP Radeon RV100, and one of the new RV200 cards as the
high-end. Maybe we'll get an All-In-Wonder to work as a standard Radeon and
someday get around to making more of it work when we have time. The Radeon
PCI Mac Edition (32MB DDR instead of SDR, and 66MHz PCI compared to 33MHz in
the PC version) probably won't be supported. On our opinion, the Mac price
tag isn't worth the small benefit, as it's virtully guaranteed to not work in
66MHz PCI mode, with people wanting to plug in PCI ethernet cards and stuff
like that. So we won't support Mac Edition if it doesn't work perfect with
the drivers we release. It's too soon to decide exactly which of all the
models we'll deal with once we have AGP slots available.


Bill Toner
Forefront Technologies, Inc. (previously Progressive Data Systems)
bill@...