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C:Amie - 2021-09-10 5:00 PM
Just be clear, I was referring to
https://www.usedhandhelds.com/handheld-resource-cd-over-300-worth-of... . I am shocked to learn that you were not receiving royalty payments from this! I had always just assumed that everyone got a % of sales.
I understand fully about the dichotomy of changing interests and loyalty to history, so no shade from me in that respect. It is very interesting to hear the back-story on it though and that there was a 2.0 in the works. It would have been interesting to see.
Kudos on the VR. Do you code for yourself as your work, or work 9-5 and coding was your side hustle?
No, I never got $1 of money from any of the Thaddeus publishing promotions, and stopped providing unlock codes for them in 2009. Their promise of "but you'll get publicity"
(much like those promises made to artists instead of paying them
) never amounted to much. I may have some details wrong, but I definitely didn't get royalties, neither was I promised any.
PocketDOS 2.0 didn't offer much in new functionality. It was pretty much a rewrite of the entire code base, and it took forever to get it to a point where it worked properly. By that time
(around 2010 or 2011
), there was zero point in working on DOS emulators, and I haven't really looked at it since.
I work for myself, something that PocketDOS enabled me to do in the early 2000s
(XT-CE was originally developed as a side hustle
). I did lift a few lines of code from PocketDOS for the VR product. IIRC it was some of the copy-protection code. There was an arms race between myself and Russian and eastern European crackers in the late 2000s. They were bored
(long winters, I guess
) and spent ridiculous amounts of time cracking PocketDOS, just to give it away
(it was a challenge for them to beat copy protection, they didn't even want to use it
). Eventually, I won, with the more recent versions of PocketDOS having incredibly complex copy protection, that AFAIK no one ever cracked. It's certainly not what I wanted to be doing at the time, but learning how to crack software just so I could beat the crackers was good education. At that time, I believe the attention span of the crackers was about 100 hours, so if you could keep them busy for that long, they would eventually give up.
Edited by PocketDOS 2021-09-11 6:01 AM
I will send you an email. 
(I doubt anyone buys these Pocket PC / Windows Mobile apps much though) 