[stella] Clarifications

[Glenn Saunders <cybpunks@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I just want to clarify a couple points here for those who may be confused 
or a little concerned about the GameDeveloper.Net discussions.

I have no intention of trashing stellalist, exploiting you guys for profit, 
or calling into question the validity of writing for the 2600 vs. Java 
applets or Shockwave games.

I apologize for talking about it here if you aren't interested in the idea, 
but like we discussed a long while ago, I had hoped to do something 
web-related as far as consolidated 2600 tech information, and there is a 
desire on my part to centralize things for the sake of convenience and to 
add more robust back-end support.  I wasn't necessarily thinking about a 
full blown CVS repository, but it's a possibility.

The net result being to provide more functionality to everyone to research, 
collaborate, and communicate with eachother better, and to open things up 
more to the general public to see some of the process that goes on here.

The dev tools on the original Stella CD were put there as an 
EXPERIMENT.  Russ, Dan, Jim, and myself wondered to ourselves whether out 
of the now-convenient way to write and distribute code, and the creation of 
Stellalist, a little rebirth of 2600 coding might result.  It didn't become 
as big as I had hoped, but it is a small but stable group.  I still wonder 
what might happen if the hobby of 2600 programming were more out in the 
open, whether it might bring a lot of new blood into the fold.  So the part 
of GDN relevant to Stellalist is very much an extension of that original 
experiment, to see if this might turn into a bigger, more mainstream hobby 
by rubbing elbows with the larger group of independent game authors.  Don't 
laugh, it might actually happen, and if it did, I know I would get a real 
kick out of it.  You never know.  I never thought so many Vectrex games 
would ever be written as there were, and that system is far more obscure 
than the 2600.

Cyberpunks Entertainment is a sole proprietorship.  I have no formal 
business plan for GameDevelopers.Net.  I do have contacts and will be doing 
some schmoozing where opportunities present themselves, but selling the 
site isn't the reason to do it.  (If that were the case, I'd build a porno 
site.)  But I wouldn't want the site to be invisible to the world.  I'd 
like it to be successful, and since it's a side-project, I'd have to 
ultimately either let it go in order to allow it to grow beyond a certain 
point, or quit my job to work on it fulltime.  I'm not quite optimistic 
enough about it to think the latter would occur ;)

If it stays small, then I'll just keep paying the $30 some odd bucks a 
month for the hosting in order to provide this free service to everyone and 
I won't put banners on (other than maybe some webring and link exchange 
stuff like I have on the Cyberpunks site).


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