Cryptic Allusion

Cryptic Allusion is a software development group led by Megan Potter that has written several games and demos for the Dreamcast, including a commercially-sold game (Feet of Fury) and the most successful and widely-used homebrew software kit KallistiOS. Megan Potter also developed libdream, the first free development library for the Dreamcast. At the moment they are working on a Jump'n Run game called Donk: Samurai Duck

September 2001 Interview with Megan Potter

This an interview with Megan Potter from B00B! Dreamcast Research. It was taken on the 27th September, 2001 by Wraggster and was edited by TheGypsy.

B00B! Dreamcast Research: Can you tell us where were you born, where you live, your family details, etc.?

Megan Potter: I was born in Dallas, TX and lived there for 16 years until I moved out for college in Denton (also TX) and then Austin (again, TX). My dad's a geek of sorts himself, working as a machinist for engineers at design shops, and occasionally doing a bit of design work himself. His hobby now is making wind chimes and selling them at various weekend markets =). He's probably responsible in large part for me getting into computers and technology at all, I've got two older sisters who harrass me incessantly about how much of a geek I am. In a good natured way of course =). My step-mom's always asking when I'll strike it rich in my game development work so they can retire to Colorado but I suppose for the near future I'll have to keep saying "soon", hehe =)

I have lived in Austin, TX since 1996, where I've been going to college. I recently lived in Tucson, AZ for 9 months and will move back there once I finish my degree. Can't beat the scenery, hiking/biking, amazingly dark sky for astronomy geeks, etc... just a great place. I guess Jessica (the girlfriend) moving back there helps to make that decision as well =)

B00B: What qualifications do you have? What made you get into computers?

DP: I'm kind of combining these two because they're quite related.

Hmm... where do I start? (I did warn you about that head inflation thing ^_^;). When I was 4 years old, my father brought home a Speak and Spell from TI (where he was working at the time). Employee store, good discounts, etc. I think from that moment on it was too late for me to get interested in anything else for quite a while =). I got a TI-99/4A home computer when was 5 or so, and it grew from the simple console with Basic and Logo to a home computer workstation (lol). Basic console had extra RAM and a speech synth hacked into it, new cooler power supply, expansion box with a persistent RAM disk, two floppy drives, all those goodies! =D On that thing I learned 9900 assembly, and we bought a PC not too long after that.

I guess it went from there: I spent most of my waking hours at school or on the computer. I wrote a tracker called "Farandole Composer" which some of you may remember with curses =). I participated somewhat as a side in the PC demo scene of the time, but we never really made much in the way of demos, and did a lot of talking. =\ Ah well, I got a few friends from that time. I had a BBS called Programmer's Oasis (it was 214-328-6142, if anyone remembers better by that =).

I participated in a competition programming team in high school. It was a geeky high school (Science/Engineering Magnet) so we were like the football stars of the school. That was pretty damned cool, for a change =). I left there after two years to go to the Texas Academy of Math and Science, in Denton, where they shut you in a dorm with 399 other smart (and mischeivious) people for two years... man was that a riot! =) I got my high school diploma and two years of college there and moved to Austin, to finish a CS degree at UT. I'm still trying, but I've almost got it =).

I'll stop there before I bore everyone, but suffice to say I've been sitting in front of a keyboard for a large part of my life since 5, and I'm 23 now. I've got a strong interest (probably thanks to school) in understanding computational science and how things _should_ work rather than just getting them working, but just kicking back and coding is quite enjoyable as well =)

B00B: What projects/coding have you done previous to any Dreamcast programming?

DP: I listed a few above, but of interest to the DC community are of course the demos; I also worked on several (abortive) game project attempts with a friend of mine from Science/Engineering (hi Matt! =). These started with a simple overhead tile map and progressed over the years to a full Quake-style engine with source lighting and a custom scripting engine.

Also of trivia value is that KallistiOS/DC was not the first incarnation of KallistiOS. Most people probably don't know this =). KOS was originally a project for the PC. I had a book called "Advanced 386 Programming" (I think that was it) that introduced me to protected mode, multitasking, etc. I had to sit down and write one =). I did all of that from that book and manuals I found on the net, so it proves you don't need a bunch of official devkit materials nor a degree to do this sort of thing. Just a keen interest and a lot of determination.

B00B: What made you get into Dreamcast Development?.

DP: It was almost an accident, quite literally. My roomate Phil invited us over to play Soul Calibur a long time ago, and I was so floored by the amazingness of that game (and obviously the system underneath it) that I added it to near the top of my "acquire when money arrives" list =). Soon after I bought the DC, they sent me an image for the CDX. Now, this was fantastic because I could play imports and all of that, but it got the gears turning in my head: if I can burn a normal CDR and run it on the DC with THEIR code, why not replace the code and burn my own anyway? I started hacking on the CDX and eventually found Marcus Comstedt's site. I didn't have a "Coder's cable" at the time so Tursi helped me out by running my test program and sending a screen shot.

I got on the mailing list and started being more active with it, and a few weeks later I couldn't stand the suspense any longer: me and Jordan ordered the parts and built two cables, and I bought a SCSI CD-R to burn DC CDs with (since the one at work didn't do the job).

Tursi and I worked on what was to become libdream for a little while, and eventually that did morph into libdream. I later got to discussing the idea with Jordan of writing a real embedded OS for the DC, and that was when KallistiOS/DC was born. It shares the name and some of the concepts of the original KOS/i386 but none of the code. Things just kind of went from there.

B00B: Was Ghetto Pong a good learning step onto bigger things and how complex was it to code and get running nicely?

DP: Oh yeah. [[Ghetto Pong]9 was Jordan's baby actually. He wanted to write a Pong clone for the DC just to play around with the coding aspects of it, so the original Ghetto Pong was actually just a red square moving across the screen with green block paddles. That's why it's "Ghetto"! =D I took that work of his and added menus, background music (thanks El Mobo! =), and sound effects, and his brother Kyle added some graphics. The result is the Ghetto Pong you see today.

'B00B: How did you start and what programs did you use to start coding?

DP: I think I managed to answer this above during my lengthy discussion of my start with computing =). I'll add to it, though, that I used:

• TI Basic, then
• TI Logo, then
• TI Extended Basic, then
• TI 9900 assembler, then
• GW Basic, then
• Power Basic, then
• Turbo Pascal for DOS, then
• Turbo C for DOS, then
• Watcom C for DOS, then
• GCC for Linux

That pretty much brings it up to modern =). I've had stints with Haskell, Python, Scheme, and a number of others that I don't use for "mainstream" work now.

B00B: Tell us about your KallistiOS and libdream projects and did you have any idea that your work is looked on as the most significant piece of hobbyist software on the Dreamcast?

DP: I guess I'll give an anecdote about KallistiOS that is kind of amusing, which I've talked about previously only in a translated Spanish interview. When we started KOS, we were trying to decide on a name. The original suggestion was actually "HuevOS", believe it or not. Our mascot was an egg, wearing a sombrero, and riding a surf board! (just consider all the puns for a minute =). Eventually, though, KallistiOS was chosen as the name because of the high interest among the authors in Discordianism =)

I didn't know that it would eventually be looked upon as one of the most significant pieces of hobbyist software, when I started (or rather, when we started =). I guess it started the same way as any free software / open source project: there was a need to be filled, I wanted it filled, and I worked towards doing so. I guess the DC is complex enough that once there was a base and someone was working hard on it, no one else wanted to take the effort. The exceptions I know of are great work too, but they seem not to have caught on very much.

I guess to me it became "truly significant" when I realized that people high up inside Sega were looking at it for more than a glance. =) Not for usage in anything official, just that they had added it to their map. Everyone on the dcdev list is probably familiar with this story though.

B00B: What plans for the future do you have for KOS and KosWin?

DP: I'll answer the second first since it's easiest =). I don't have any plans for KosWin because it was just something I did on a whim to try to help out some people who were having troubles. It seems on retrospect that the idea was well placed, but I'm kind of a fish out of water in the Windows world. ^_^; So I'm hoping other people will pick up the idea and go with it, and it seems that is happening. I'll be happy to host a good one on SourceForge's behalf (HEH).

For KOS itself, I am basically hoping that it will grow to fill every need for hobbyists that was filled by Katana for official developers. This sounds a bit presumptuous, but I feel like we're already there to a large degree. I can't name any names, but a developer at SEGA told me once that my tools were easier to use than theirs for some things! With the addition of KGL, an unencumbered MP3 player (working on it =), and the re-integration of things like lwIP and OS mode, it could go just about anywhere. I guess we'll just see what happens.

B00B: What programs have helped you on the Dreamcast and how significant is a hardware OpenGL driver and to what programs/emus would be made accessible with it?

DP: I guess as far as what _programs_ have helped, the major one has been dc-load and dc-load-ip. Marcus Comstedt's tools have always come out as a sort of first pass to get people going, and then Andrew's tools come out and perfect the process. That has really helped things along.

On the hardware OpenGL driver, be careful on terminology here. I'll be quick to point out (and so would SGI's lawyers! =) that what we have isn't an OpenGL implementation, but an OpenGL-like library. This is an important distinction, because I want to make GL programmers feel at home (and have something easier than raw TA for myself!). But it's not really OpenGL.

I think the GL driver, though, is VERY significant. I didn't realize until I started using it myself just how convienent it is. With a few more mapping modes (e.g., ortho) and some glu functions, it could easily cut development time for DC things in half or more. I've definitely become a believer of GL at this point =)

What could be made with it? Your imagination's the limit!(tm) Once lwIP gets re-integrated (and I've potentially got some SMB code coming from someone else) you could spend an afternoon writing an MP3 jukebox with fantastic visualizations. Games, demos, and even emulators. Who knows. The same things are possible that were before, they are just much easier.

On emulators, I don't really know. I guess it's up to the emulator authors to be ingenious enough to use the 3D at all. This is not a simple problem since most earlier systems assume very low level control over the output (like SNES's HDMA).

B00B: What programs/apps/emus would you most like to see come out on the Dreamcast?

DP: I'm looking forward to JamDu coming out, if for no other reason than to see what came of that late-night inspiration almost a year ago =). Something else I always thought would be pretty nifty is a Dreamcast tracker. Why not?? You've got 64 channels of wave table sound, hardware accelerated 3D for any sort of inteface you want, a keyboard, a mouse, and space to save files (BBA, mainly). Even though Farandole was my last, I have still maintained an interest in trackers. Emulators.. I'd like to see a SNES emulator finished with full frame rate and sound quality. I'd love to pull out some old classic games and play them on a console again, since the original machines tend to decay and break over time.

Beyond that, I'm always interested to see demos and games. Delicious was a very cool surprise that I've shown all my friends to say "here, this sort of thing is why I've been slaving over this box!" =)

B00B: What's your opinion of the new super consoles like Xbox, Gamecube, Game Boy Advance, and the Playstation 2?

DP: Oh man. You could fill a whole interview with this. =) But I'll refrain since I've got to run to class in about 15 minutes.

• Xbox: Microsoft owns it, they're gonna do it wrong. I've seen some things on this machine that look VERY cool, like Jet Set Radio Future, and Dead or Alive 3. I've heard that the Microsoft titles are really looking up too, but the ones I saw at E3 were pretty disappointing. Guess time will tell. One thing I will say, it's HUGE. Way too big. For that reason alone it will probably fail in Japan.

• Gamecube: Looks nifty, well put together, solid company behind it as usual. This will be a "safe" console to get for some fun games. The Star Wars game looked outstanding (again, at E3) but most of the others were not so super looking. Again, I guess time will tell. Integration with the GBA will definitely help the 'cube.

• GBA: High on the cool factor, and it's great to have a real console to play a lot of old games being ported up. I'm guessing this thing hasn't even remotely been fully tapped for potential, and it's already got some amazing 3D-looking titles (like that tunnel game, can't remember the name now!), a DivX player (slow, but it's there), etc.

• PS2: This is a really great machine processing power wise, but Sony has made the same mistake that they killed Sega for on the Saturn: the box has amazing processing capabilities, but it's extremely hard to code for. I don't even want to think about what they had to do to that thing to get GT3 out of it =). And I have to comment on one other aspect that always irritated me about it: whole lotta hype, normal amount of substance. Sony's PS2 marketing probably killed the DC, even though the majority of the released games for DC are far superior in game play and enjoyability to the PS2 titles out. This may change over time but I'm not keeping my hopes up.

B00B: Which console looks the best for dev'ing on?

DP: Still the DC. Except of course that your audience is quickly waning. I'd say next in line behind that are GBA and probably Xbox (it's a PC, it can't be that hard to get into =). Last I heard PS2 is still a major pain to dev for but this may improve in the near future.

B00B: What are your favourite games for every system you have owned?

DP: Ahh, well this one is easy! I've only owned two systems -- PS1 and DC.

For PS1 I've like a lot of games on it, but I'd have to say one of the "good but unknown" titles is N2O. If you haven't played it, do so. It's cheap, and it's like concentrated Crystal Method (the band) stuffed into a game =)

For DC, I basically haven't disliked any of the games =). They are almost all fantastic, at least the major ones. I've had a lot of fun with Evolution (3D Nethack, I like to call it), and a lot of team play fun with Phantasy Star.

B00B: Your thoughts on the Dreamcast Emulation/Development Scene and how can it be improved?

DP: I've probably said enough above already, but the one thing that could really help the scene is the one thing that's never gonna happen now: continued support for the hardware. I had glittery dreams of a hobbyist section in ODCM (which is now dead), some sort of hobbyist area on Sega's DC site (slowly dieing), who knows. That whole dialogue with John on the dcdev list was very promising. Suddenly, overnight, it became the "console that could have been". A truly regrettable state of affairs, but I guess a company's gotta do what it's gotta do to stay alive.

At least Sega has continued making games! Their games have almost always been trend setters and it's good to see they will continue to be. See here, Tecmo already has a Space Channel 5 clone =). Anyway, I digress...

B00B: Thank you for your time; it has been a honour for the scene. - wraggster

2004 Interview with Megan Potter

This interview with Megan Potter was taken by MetaFox for the DreamOn magazine #1, which was released at the Midwest Gaming Classic in 2004.

How did Cryptic Allusion begin?

To start all the way at the beginning, I was going to do some web consulting for a company I was interning with for the summer in Dallas, TX. They advised me that tax-wise, I'd probably end up doing best if I formed a company to do the consulting through. My task then was to come up with a unique name that someone else wouldn't have already taken, and Cryptic Allusion was it. I'm still not 100% sure where those specific words came from, but that's what I came up with.

Cryptic Allusion didn't do any more web consulting after that, and in fact it didn't do much of anything business related for a long time. It sort of morphed into a label for me plus any current group of friends that were working on something interesting. The membership of that group fluctuated over the years.

During my years at the University of Texas, I was approached by a group of starry eyed game industry hopefuls trying to draft me into their game making effort. This included a number of people who are some of my best friends now, including Roddy. The original plan was to do a shooter type game for the PS2 (not quite out yet, at that time) and move on from there to an RPG project. We would get some basic stuff worked out and then hunt for funding, which was a pretty sound idea back in those days.

The long and short of it is that after a very exciting start, the group more or less melted away. But I was too obsessed with the idea of starting a game company at that point, being as how it had also been my goal (little did they know) since I was about 6 years old.

When I started getting into DC homebrew, I saw an opportunity arise for such a project. I emailed up Roddy and said: How would you like to work on this DC project? I probably can't pay you right now, but it might be a good way to get yourself out there. He responded back saying that he'd pay ME to work on a project, any project. Apparently Roddy felt the same way about all this game stuff.

Our goal was to produce Tryptonite, the originally planned shooter game, for E3 and pass it out there as a way to get started. For various reasons we had some organizational and communication issues between ourselves and third party guys we'd pulled in to do parts of the game, so it was morphed into DC Tonic by executive decision about a month before E3.

This turned out to be a good deal, as I believe DC Tonic still stands as one of the cornerstones of the DC homebrew scene's accomplishments. It also (along with some contacts of one of our members) got us into the invite-only Sega booth (score!)

I'll continue this below in question 2...

How did the idea for Feet of Fury materialize?

After E3 we were sort of basking in the glow of the press and industry attention we'd attained with DC Tonic. We had also been infected by Dance Dance Revolution at A-Kon shortly after E3 (I use the word "infected" here because it's the most accurate -- once you catch DDR, you feel the compulsion to play day and night until it's out of your system a few years later). Roddy's a musician who makes some good dance/techno. The wheels started turning -- maybe there's some way we could put Roddy's music into DDR. I said, hey, I've got this nifty DC homebrew stuff sitting here, why don't I see what I can whip up?

Well, the momentum generated there was a lot more than we expected. We were playing DDR and talking about the possibilities of making our own and such, and someone (can't remember who, might have been me) said, why should we make a DDR clone? Why don't we go way beyond DDR and make the game into something new and interesting instead of the same-old-same-old? We'd also been playing a real load of Puzzle Fighter, so the obvious idea was to combine the two and allow players to "attack" by throwing "arrow bombs" to the opponent when they were doing well.

During our testing it became apparent that the idea of arrow bombs was not enough to make it more interesting than DDR. It needed more. A weird combination of "eureka!" and a mis-communication with one of our artists was what spawned the idea of having lots of different types of attacks. We knew we were on to something there and had to pursue it.

Later on we realized also that if we actually finished this thing then we might be able to sell it and make money, and that meant a real business structure. So in November we filed for an LLC in Texas, and Cryptic Allusion, LLC was born as a "real" company at that point. All of FoF and all of our future productions are now under that banner.

Every time Feet of Fury is shown at game shows it gets a rather large presence of people around it. Do you feel Feet of Fury stands up well in arcade like areas with the likes of DDR?

Well, as you probably know, a creator of a work is never entirely pleased with the results. :) I think FoF could have been more than it is.

Even so, ignoring the new features we've added that have made FoF a different game from DDR, I believe the "feel" of FoF is actually better. As a long time DDR player, I prefer to play FoF at this point, and given the self-criticism I mentioned above, I think that's a pretty important statement.

I won't name any names, but we had some serious interest from a big-name company in an early publishing deal on FoF and they did some testing of the game with some of the DDR scene's biggest players. They were dubious at first but played for quite a while and liked it.

I believe if we were able to go back and make FoF arcade machines with real, industrial-strength pads, and tons of music, we could take on DDR any day. Especially if people could bring their own Swap CDs to the arcade and play their own music, or arcades could provide their own Swap CDs to diffrentiate themselves from competing arcades (we had the competing arcades a lot in Austin). People love DDR but they are tired of Konami delivering the same game over and over with small tweaks in each edition, and increasingly annoying music. I know people who like the DDRMAX series, but most DDR people I know talk about the "good ol' days" of 4th and 5th mix. People are itching for something new and I'm sad that we can't provide that with our current operation.

Is there anything that you wish Feet of Fury could have had if it had a bigger budget and a longer development cycle?

I think Roddy covered this pretty well in his interview, but basically we would have liked to have had more music and better graphics (the part I worked on; our character artists were FANTASTIC). We would have liked to have actual animated characters with voice acting, acting out their fight in the background just like Puzzle Fighter or Puyo Puyo. We'd have loved to have an anime intro sequence encoded in high quality Ogg Theora. Most of all I would have liked more time to do several rounds of play testing to flesh out what works well and what doesn't in the gameplay. I think some of that is fairly rough still. I'm somewhat unhappy with the cleanliness of the code as well, but I ended up refactoring a lot of it about 10 times, which resulted in some nice free libraries like Parallax and Tsunami for all KOS users.

It could have been a lot worse, so I think we did quite well within the constraints we had.

How did you come up with the idea for the Typing of Fury mode?

The real origins of ToF are somewhat apocryphal at this point -- I searched our email list archives and I honestly can't find the email that started it all, but I know the idea was first presented around the end of September a little after IGF. I think I originally proposed it. It's the sort of twisted thing that would come out of my head.

Typing of Fury was one of those "nooooo freaking waaay" additions to the game that happened kind of late, but I'm very happy we included it because it's extremely original. It really sets us apart from the other rhythm games. As far as I know, no one has ever made a typing rhythm game before.

I am actually happier with ToF than the main FoF "item battle" mode because we got to do a few rounds of tester feedback and improve the gameplay dramatically before it became a huge investment to redo it.

As an aside, an excerpt from our mailing list that I can't avoid throwing in from my friend David, rejected announcer voice ideas:

"YES, my PRECIOUSSSSS... DANSSSES IT DOESSSS, YESSSS!"

What are your thoughts on the commercial future of the Dreamcast in the homebrew realm?

There are some really fantastic possibilities there, but there are definitely some stumbling blocks.

I think a lot of it's going to depend a great deal on whether people can feel good sticking with it instead of heading to the "next big thing". By that I mean, do you feel good continuing to make 100% legal and sellable games for a slightly dead system, or do you have to have the newest, like Xbox or PS2? And I think it depends too on whether people continue to buy new homebrew Dreamcast games even though the system isn't commercially produced anymore. I have actually been fairly baffled by the lack of interest in this so far, compared to bigger homebrew scenes, considering that authors are still making loads of cash on very old systems like the Vectrix and Atari 2600.

I can tell you, anyone who is out there thinking about making a DC homebrew title, if you complete it and it looks professional, there are several people who'd be happy to publish it for you. The market is starting slowly and small but it is there.

Another big stumbling block is one that is present in any sort of creative undertaking: deciding when enough's enough. A group of four guys plus a handful of outside musicians produced FoF in our free time, and it took us several years. And FoF isn't such an amazing product for several years' worth of work; we vastly underestimated the required effort. So many DC homebrew projects are started with HUGE ambitions like "create a full RPG". That's a really noble goal, but it's simply not possible, especially as a first project. I think DC Tonic and FoF were way beyond where Cryptic Allusion should have been at the time, and the only way we finished them was by putting in an incredible amount of obsessive effort, lost sleep and sanity, etc.

Developers are going to need to get their teams going reliably and start kind of small. The most important thing is to _finish a project_. Your first completed project is not going to be a masterpiece; it doesn't have to be. The goal is to get momentum going for yourself and your team so that you can work up to greater and greater things, attract more talent, get contacts, and ultimately make that really awesome game you want to make. And hey, who knows, maybe you will have gotten enough attention then to get published on a still-active console.

I urge anyone who's seriously interested in all of this to contact me at dpotter@cagames.com, and I'll be happy to discuss it with you.

Do you think that shareware can work in the Dreamcast market?

Absolutely. I believe shareware is the way to kickstart the DC homebrew market. I think that what we are really going to have to work on, to make it work right, is the delivery.

There was an argument about this on our forums, but there are essentially two types of shareware:

• 1) Download and try a demo; if you like it, send money and you get a full professionally pressed CD and manual in the mail like a "real" game;

• 2) Download a limited version; if you like it, send money and they'll send you more levels, a code to unlock new areas, etc.

The first one is easy, but it requires some manufacturing costs up front, which make it kind of less attractive for smaller developers (which still mostly includes us). FoF is proof that the first option is quite feasible if you have some investment.

What you really want for kickstarting the market is the second option, so people can sell little one-off puzzle and fighting games for $5 a pop or something. These make great impulse buys, and you're supporting the game makers you like directly. The problem there is that the decent communications peripherals for the DC are rare, and there was no real persistent storage produced. So you'd need a very reliable and uniform way to burn the games to a CDR on a PC. And as we probably all know, that just hasn't happened.

What it's going to have to happen is that someone needs to make a delivery mechanism that is extremely easy and transparent to use for buying the games and burning these games to the customer's CDRs. Self-Boot Inducer (SBI) and Dream Inducer (DI) are a great start there, but I think there needs to be a more polished and integrated package to handle the whole task, and it needs to support all platforms (PC, Mac, Linux). Ideally something along the lines of iTunes(tm), but for DC games: browse the store, check out preview videos (and maybe demo versions), add the games you like to your cart, and then check out to get your "game bundles". Insert a CD and select the games you want on it, and tell it to burn. Out pops a bootable CD with a professional quality selection menu (or no menu perhaps if the user only burned one game to the disc).

Once you have such a system, the "option #1" games will follow as the most popular authors get a following and earn enough money to fund better games and manufacturing.

Any insight towards what Cryptic Allusion has planned for the future?

First and foremost, we are planning to continue to make DC homebrew titles for as long as we can stand it. :) Another project is now in the works which will probably be announced officially by the time this magazine is published.

Second, I am going to continue to maintain and improve KallistiOS for the community as long as I can, and through me CA will be contributing a lot of code to the community from our projects. Numerous improvements to KOS which have become quite important to the community now (such as the new PVR system, KGL, and the new Maple system) were started so that we could write FoF. Much code has been contributed directly from FoF as well, such as the Parallax and Tsunami libraries. We plan to continue this trend with future projects and eventually release the full sources for all of our game projects under a free license somewhat like ID with the old Wolf, Doom, etc.

Third, we plan to continue our market building strategies for the DC homebrew community. This involves making and selling more games of our own, and perhaps some of the infrastructure support for the shareware model I mentioned above. I'm convinced that approach would make things really take off, and I'd like to help jumpstart it.