Imagine this example...say a restaurant has a great view and terrific food, such that the customers thank the owners and tell them what a wonderful experience they had. Now if those same customers then turn around and say..."OK, now that we've thanked you, we have some demands....The view is so great that we want you to let us bring our own food and sit at your tables, and if you don't let us sit for free, we will make a fuss, stand around outside, sneak in when we can and generally make things difficult for your business."...Well, you can imagine what would happen to this restaurant...It would likely go out of business, or be forced to upset those customers by insisting that they purchase food while eating and enjoying the restaurant atmosphere.

This analogy can be loosely applied to LDA.

We do run a business, and aside from the personal loss to us as a family, Seumas' death has forced us to hire a number of programmers with the result that our costs have gone up. ...and as we plan to stay in "business", we must deal with these demands for free access to our product code in a "business like manner"...

Now to be specific about DX-Ball 2, back on August 18th, 1999 Seumas posted

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"I know we said we'd have the new DX-Ball 1.3 with support for more boards out by now. Sorry about that! Tread Marks development (and some other real world things I won't bore you with) has been taking all our time lately."
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Now, as everyone now knows, those other "real world things" that Seumas referred to, were that he was dying of cancer and having difficulty working as a result of chemotherapy.

Current LDA observations, comments and plans...

First...the four board limit allows players to create sets of four personal boards, which should satisfy the needs of those who want to create a few personal boards for birthdays or other occasions.

Second...as LDA has not released an editor of its own, we have decided not to try to block the other editors that have been created. This does not mean that we endorse these editors, or that we recognize the quality of the code or the end products to be up to LDA standards. It is obvious that we can't help with any problems that players have while using these editors or board-packs created by these editors.

Third...as an interesting observation, if these third party editors were friendly to LDA, only allowing four board sets to be created, then the complaints would be directed at the makers of these editors rather than at LDA.... Now that would be a change

Fourth...LDA is 100% opposed to any attempt to break the four-board limit in DX-Ball 2. We will be asking sites to remove any instructions, reference or links to breaking the DX-Ball 2 code with a hex editor, specifically to break the four-board limit.

Sites that refuse to correct these situations can only be seen as pirate sites, and are responsible for posts on their sites after being dutifully notified.

Finally...after our new programmers get settled in, we will discuss whether or not to create or release a new version of DX-Ball 2...

Jim

DX-ball 2 is a stolen idea from an old Amiga game called "Megaball".
If u people here on the board would like some real fun, go find an Amiga 500 and a copy of "Megaball". DX-ball is just a lame conversion for the PC.

Would hexing to get unlimited lives mess with LDA earning money? Well, no, but all High Scores made then would be false.

In DX-Ball 2 there seems to be not only a 4-board limit, but also a limit for user-made boards. I tried to make a level set with 4 boards with DXBoard, and I put it in the right directories and so on, but nothing happened...

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Spug
of the Enigma crew

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Spug
of the Enigma crew