andrewb
Well-known member
The only real reason to want closeups of the design would be to copy it in some way... and this has since been proven. Like you said, Scott's designs are simplistic, and looking at original Atari schematics would be more helpful for pretty much any other need.
Nobody disagrees that he wanted to reverse engineer the design. We agree that this is the only reason someone would want that info. In fact, that much is so obvious, there's nobody to 'catch' doing anything here. That was apparent when he made his post.
My point is that you're assuming his intentions are/were nefarious in some way. And you had no way of knowing that, both then, and now.
Nothing has been 'proven since'. Yes, he wanted to copy it. So what? I'm sure you've made copies of other peoples' work, to play around with them, in order to understand and create the many great freeplay mods that you've done, which I use and enjoy. That's how we learn a lot of stuff here.
Knowing what we've seen from this person, it's entirely within the realm of possibility that he just wanted to play with the thing, understand how it works, learn a few things, and maybe try to integrate it into his design. Purely for fun, and the technical enjoyment and curiosity of it. Nobody besides him had any way of knowing what his intentions were beyond that. It's only if he's going to try to do something commercial with it without Scott's permission that it would become a problem, and there was/is no evidence of that.
And as long as he's doing this in the comfort of his own home and bench, is there anything wrong with that? Should he be accused of doing something wrong?
It was actually the opposite. It was a fight reflex from being caught. If he really was doing nothing, and someone accused him of it, then he could have given an honest reason, rather than flipping out and lying about why he needed it.
That's your perspective of the situation. One could just as easily say that it was the fight response for already having been attacked. He didn't throw the first punch. And I get (as I'm sure you can as well) that there's nothing more annoying than being accused of doing something wrong, when that isn't the case.
Both sides escalated things here. It happens. Reach out and give the guy an olive branch, via PM.



