derSammler wrote on 2020-05-29, 08:57:
You know, someone once had these plans...
But I agree. I don't like seeing genuine AWE64 cards getting destroyed for this. The arguments why this is legit are lame. People cry when e.g. C64s are taken apart and the parts are sold individually, even though it's the home computer with the most units sold ever. People cry when scrappers destroy even non-special hardware and sell it for the pure worth of the material, and so on. But destroying sought-after AWE64 cards is okay - because someone decides there are plenty of them and they are of no worth anyway..? I guess if I plan to sell the new cards for 200 bucks each and not making the design open-source (so only I can make the money), I'd argue that way as well...
Personally, I'm not too sad about destroying AWE64 cards for this. Sure, there will be less of them around, but in their place there will be ones with real OPL3, MPU401 and maxed out RAM etc. They're not being scrapped for gold, or other raw materials either. Scrapping for raw materials does bother me somewhat, considering some old parts have become rarer as a result, but it's not the end of the world either. As for C64s being taken apart for parts, I don't get people crying about it either. If anything, it makes getting parts for them somewhat easier, since parts like SID chips or 6502 CPUs aren't really produced anymore AFAIK. Admittedly, I would have liked the project to be open source, but wouldn't that lead to even more AWE64s getting destroyed in the long run? Unless of course, someone made an FPGA reimplementation, but that would also cost one or two AWE64s to decapsulate their chips and study them for who knows how long.