AlienALX
Well-known member
/long post, hope you got your reading specs on lol.
Many years ago (nearly ten, woohoo my ten year anniversary of being clean !) I used to code/design front ends for an emulator. That's about the simplest way I can describe it. I worked alongside a genius, who released fully working emulators he had coded from scratch. We had what we called a "scene" and I used to spend around 25-30 hours a piece drawing, lighting, coding in coordinates and giving these things away for free.
I guess because the top dog coder guy was a close personal friend I was considered his spokesperson.
That, dude, is about where the normal sounding bit of it takes a U-turn.
As I said, I was basically dedicating my life to this "scene". I spent all of my time that my wife was working busting my ass on these things. Consider, each front end could have 250 lamps. That means you need to draw the artwork in Photoshop (or clean up some real photos) and then darken the main image before lighting up 250 lamps manually. That means drawing around each one, going to filter-lighting-omni lamp, changing the settings for each lamp and then moving onto the next. So yeah, 25-30 hours per front end. I calculate that I pulled off around 500. Some were obviously easier than others but yeah. With any spare cash I had I bought resources (artwork on fliers etc). Here's what I got for it.
* People calling me the C word all of the time.
* Only one guy ever did something kind in return for all of my free work. That was during 8 years of it.
* I was constantly being nagged, asked and even threatened to tell people when the next release was coming. And it if was late or my mate decided they were being anuses he would not release it and I would get the full blame. I've had threats, death threats, threats of people breaking into my house and stealing the code and etc etc. I also had one guy phone my place of work trying to get me sacked because I called him a name.
* Private info and beta versions were constantly leaked, defaced and etc etc.
* I was the scape goat. So if my mate had an axe to grind he would make sure no one got any updates and of course, I was the stupid idiot on the receiving end as I was considered the spokesperson.
Now I know, this has nothing to do with AMD at all. However, I have seen human nature at its worst. So yeah, this is emulating gambling machines not graphics cards but it's pretty much the same thing. Dealing with a few thousand aholes who want it all now.
If, for example, you told some one Vega was being hard launched and in stock on the 30th June (just an example date) then they would forget that in about two seconds and start demanding benchmarks. Then they would accuse you of doctoring the benchmarks, only running them in favour of your hardware etc etc..
I PMed Wraith last week when I wasn't feeling too good (thank you for reaching out to me, see how much better that is than banning me?) and said this. I was being a bit philosophical at the time...
Sometimes my wife and I play this game. What you do is go on the internet and visit a forum/Youtube (whichever one you like) and say something that is not 100% either true or technically accurate. Then you start your stop watch and see how long it takes for some knobend to come along and correct you.
Now, wouldn't it be better if people did their real life stuff as quickly as they take care of that?
Or something along those lines. It pretty much goes "You can't please all of the people....".
Now over the years this "scene" I was involved in started demanding more and more from me. It was possible to actually lock and encrypt your front ends. But people whined because they could not change keyboard shortcuts or edit my work into their own and make changes. So I tried to appease them by basically giving them away unlocked. I wasn't happy about it AT ALL because there were several penii being penii but I did it hoping it would fix things.
It didn't. Then it was just something else. Now I used to love that "scene" and I nearly had a nervous breakdown trying to make every one happy. It never worked. There was always some one starting crap or doing something bad to bring it down.
Example. One guy on there proved over several years that he could be trusted about as much as a perforated bucket. He leaked private software time after time after time. Now there was one rule you did not break in this "scene" and that was you don't talk about MPU5 (it was a brand new technology) and you certainly don't leak it out. That would cause serious legal problems for the main coder (not my mate, some other guy).
So what happened? well firstly some one leaked the forbidden tech and tried pinning it on me (even though I had emails that proved my innocence, because I had an older version). Then the same person basically leaked all of the source code to all of it (which was the legal problem for the owner) and then some bright spark discovers there are a couple of hundred lines of code (nothing in the grand scheme) from MAME, so basically dobbed him into the MAME team who then threatened legal action unless he made it all open source (which he had vowed he would never do).
So there, that is what happens when you try and appease the masses. Whilst the leaks involved in PC tech are far less damaging (and tbh sometimes planned IMO) they are still bad if they are real actual leaks. They can paint the wrong picture of an incomplete tech/product etc. Yet still people do it.
Doom 3 - leaked. Half Life 2 MP? leaked. You can sorta understand why Gabe keeps HL3 so well protected....
Human nature dude. All human nature. I've learned the hard way, but hey I have learned. I walked away in 2008 and never looked back ever. I sometimes check the forums (they are mostly gone or very quiet now) and there are some signs of life, but just the same old crap going on that I used to get all of the blame for.
haha
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