The problem is MESS has the reverse reputation, it's been such a god-damn awful emulator for most of the things (which people care about) it emulates for so long that hardly anybody is likely to remember it in a positive light
There certainly is a jack-of-all-trades vibe when really, really incomplete modules are left enabled in the default build.
Yet stuff like the CD-i and Super A'can support is amazing, and really makes MESS stand out, even though that's incomplete.
As long as etabeta and co stay on top of SNES bug reports when they come in, I suppose it's great. But a dead, unattended module is probably only undermining confidence when there are better alternatives out there.
the Console 'scene' tends to be very secretive, with more people concerned about making their software the best, and as a result not being helpful to others
Yes, the Saturn scene has been substantially held back by this. Thankfully Yabause is starting to make some serious headway.
The Genesis scene is the saddest. Kega Fusion, Regen and now Retrocopy. As if anyone even cares anymore, yet all the big-name Genesis emulators are as closed as could be.
The dead Gens' license isn't even legal, as it still uses the 15-year-old Starscream core that is non-commercial along with the GPL.
I remain extremely grateful for your work on HazeMD. Steve is a great guy, but if I play any Genesis games, HazeMD will be my first choice.
btw, let me know if you want to be credited for those lines
Nah, no worries.
"Good enough and familiar" is better than "new and better". Ask Internet Explorer.
I was going to make that comparison, but at least IE6 is fading below 20% now. Maybe if ZSNESv2 (aka IE7) were to come out, I'd feel less bad about it.
byuu got caught in the trap of believing what people *said* they wanted from bsnes (filters, add-on chip support) and ended up with a bunch more code to maintain and no particular increase in users.
I don't know if I believed it or not, but I was happy to oblige the people looking for game bugs. You are correct of course, I've gained probably 10-20 people in return for a dozen filters, widescreen distortion modes, 7-zip multi-archive support, etc combined.
I've been moving away from that model, the new versions split all the filters, all the compression formats, all the excess into separate external DLLs.
I was even able to get rid of the bullshit "header heuristics" crap in favor of a pure XML-based mapping system (ala Nestopia) in the latest beta. The snesreader library generates the pitiful made-up mappings we're used to if you don't have a real XML mapping file to describe the board layout.
On my own PC, I don't use those plugin DLLs at all.
Now when it comes to special chips, they have absolutely nothing to do with the base hardware. You can put an 8-core Nehalem-EX inside an SNES cart if you want. You can hook up an MRI machine to it if you wanted. But end users just can't grasp that concept. We really have no choice but to support those; and MESS would seem to agree
Ultimately you have to be working on emulation because you really enjoy it for itself. If you're in it as a user popularity contest you *will* burn out and quit.
Yes, thank you very much. Behind my rant, this was the message I wanted to convey.
It's part of what makes me sick about closed source emulators. All that wasted testing, all that wasted research, all for something people will get tired of because they're in it for all the wrong reasons.
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As for myself, I don't wish to bemoan the success of others, and I really don't care about popularity. My goal is just to get as many people as I can onto a better emulator, regardless of which one that is.
The 13-year-old VRAM write bug has been the Achilles' Heel of the SNES translation scene. The 40-file-extension support has made a mockery of file load windows. The IPS-only support and refusal to obsolete copier headers has given patching a flip-of-the-coin chance of working and complicated loading. The reliance on magical voodoo heuristics to parse single binary blobs has made ROM loading a nightmare for every developer to date. And the bugs ... I spent seven years translating a game that 70% of people still can't even play.
The entire SNES scene is stuck in 1997, and we don't have the problem the NES scene does with 200 million emulators to choose from. All we need is one emulator to take charge and we can improve so much.
I really do hope you guys get some real market share. I'd love to be able to work with an active team who cares about sanity, and is willing to inconvenience people in the short term to make everything easier for everyone in the long term.
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