From:	Adam J adamj@*********.html.com
Subject:	skillsoft chips
Date:	Sun, 21 Feb 1999 04:30:05 -0700

At 21:36 2/20/99 -0600, Mongoose wrote:

> I don't think you can burn a chip (of any kind) without its source
>code. Unless you somehow got the source code for a skillsoft (which the
>price of the chip probaly does not include), you are out of luck as far as
>making more goes. Anti-tamper measures are not really needed.

With a $200 dollar CD-rom drive, I could crank out CDs at the rate of about
25 a day. That's assuming I take some time to sleep. I saw a drive in a
computer mag today that could do 48 disks at once - Around $1000 bucks.
Data. Music. Whatever. No source code needed, just one copy of the CD.

The rules aren't going to change because the media changes. Which is why
some CD-ROMs, like the ones for Playstation, have bad sectors burned into
them (I believe this is how it's done), and the console knows to expect bad
sectors at a certain spot. If they aren't there, it won't play the CD. And
while you can solder a mod chip into your playstation, I don't think you
want to be doing that to your skillwires.. :-)

> As such, the manufacture of Skillchips is pretty much at the
>descretion of the GM, since the ability to buy (or create) skillchip
>sourcecode is not covered in SR sourcebooks.

It is something that is IMO far above the means of one person. But one
person with a nice little rack that can burn 10 chips at once could easily
setup a basement shop making illegal copies of skillchips, if they had the
distribution net to sell them afterwards..

-Adam J
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