eslapion wrote:Now that is VERY interesting, by all means please tell me more!!
Drew clearly showed he is a hardware nincompoop in the Atmel PLA thread... you know where...
I know of the RAMBOards from Chip Level Design but I didn't know people at SSI were involved in similar stuff.
Not much to tell, and my memory is a bit spotty on thirty-year-old events. SSI was the reseller/publisher in the Pacific Northwest for a lot of companies; they definitely sold the RAMBO because I purchased a few at their shop in (Vancouver? Longview? Somewhere very near Portland, anyway).
The bad blood between the PNW Commodore community and Drew went back much, much further than people think. Megasoft was a post-office box in Battleground, WA (not a long way from SSI, actually). They resold/published crap software and books, and it was not unknown for shipping delays of one year plus.
When deprotection "parameters" (actually small BASIC programs that removed protection checks from copies) started to be a thing, SSI would sell disks containing about ten or so for a few dollars in their store. Many of these parameters later found their way into Megasoft/UU products -- rearranged so that they would look different, but the same deprotection scheme.
Drew claimed that he spent a lot of time at SSI and they learned everything about deprotecting from him. Hogwash, according to the SSI guy I dealt with back in the day (and I wish I could remember his name).
There was also a rumor going around that Drew was not a mere Megasoft employee, but in fact had a significant chunk of equity in the place ... and that equity followed when they rebranded to UU and moved to Lake Havasu to avoid a lawsuit or three. I don't know if that was actually the case, but that's what was being said -- that Drew *was* Megasoft.
That's about it, I think. I dropped out of the Commodore scene about the same time that Drew started his Amiga vaporware projects, so I don't know much past that.
