Author: Keith Ian Price
Date: 12:02:56 09/12/98
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On September 12, 1998 at 03:40:28, Ed Schröder wrote: >>>We have never supported the Tasc Smartboard. Tasc once released a >>>driver for Rebel Silver which to some extend worked with Rebel7/8 and 9. >>>This driver will not work with Rebel10, too out-dated. > >>If I might allow myself to bring back into your mind, dear Ed : >>exactly this was stated, when R 9 came...... >>and the Tasc Board worked nice as allways - much to my pleasure. >>So, hopefully this might revolve... >>seriously : >>from my single sided sight I understand the decision concerning DGT - which I >>don't want to comment ( the board ), but : > >You are just one of the lucky guys that Rebel9 works with the Smartboard. > >Rebel10 is a different story as the Smartboard definitely will not work. Here >is the why: The "Tasc Rebel Silver" driver reads the moves from the graphical >board of Rebel. So whenever the driver notice a change in the "graphics" >on the board it will figure out which squares are changed and then the driver >translates that to an (understandable) move for the Smartboard. > >This driver is going to work just fine as long as: >- the board is on a fixed position of the screen; >- the squares have a fixed size; > >In Rebel10 this is no longer the case. You can move board to any position >on your screen and also the squares and pieces are re-sizeable. The 3-4 >years old Tasc driver can not handle this. A new one is needed. > >>IF a driver - as you say - is " too - outdated ", well, your Co. is one of the >>most innovative ones in the scene ; it should have been finger snippin' for you >>to " re-date " this driver to fit to the platform again....if you wanted to... >>excuse me . >>that's " politics " on the back of all the TB users - which are YOUR customers, >>- too - don't you forget that. > >Please note I am not responsible for 3th party software. I do not have written >the Tasc driver. I do not have their source code. How can I fix it? Now Tasc >has promised updates no? > >Please note that my hands are tied. The board is from Tasc and so is the >software to make the board to work. I wish to help but I can't because your >complaint is directed to the wrong company. > >- Ed - How is it that Genius 5 has an excellent .dll for windows which even allows set up of the position by using the piece recognition of the board, and all other commercial programmers (except Mindscape, which also has good support) have made the claim that there is no information, and it is impossible to get the source code, etc? Are Richard Lang and associates so capable of reverse engineering the TASC drivers to such an extent that they could create such a good interface with no help from TASC? Possibly, but I doubt that Mindscape would have done this. So it must be possible to get hold of the outline of how to make a .dll from TASC. I think that you should be honest and say that since you don't care about Auto232 for your good repeat customers, since only 2-3% in your estimation care, the same thinking applies to the Smartboard. But this percentage will go down, as you lose these customers permanently, and then you will have less to worry about. In the company that I work for, we have a single customer out of 10000, that has a certain configuration of their equipment using a third party enhancement that used reverse engineering to hook into our equipment. When we upgraded the software, changes were made that broke this interface, since we were not aware of it. Even though this customer represents less than one-tenth percent of our business last year, we spent 300 man-hours to make a patch for them so they could continue, as they had made a big investment in using this enhancement with our equipment. We could have said, tough, we didn't make it, so we won't support it, but we viewed the good relations with that customer as too important to overlook. I wish more companies would take this view. kp
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