update on strmnnrmn's blog:

Plans for R10

Now that R9 is finally available, I'm ready to start making plans for R10. Firstly, I really don't want to leave it so long between releases again. The longer I leave between releases, the more hype builds up, and the harder it is to meet people's expectations. I prefer the idea of doing fairly frequent, incremental releases rather than relasing versions with huge sets of changes periodically.

So I'm currently planning to release R10 sometime around the end of March. The question is, what should I focus on?

The areas which clearly need lots of work are speed and compatibility. Unfortunately it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation - if the emulator runs slowly, it doesn't matter if certains roms don't run, because they'd still be unplayable. On the other hand, there's no point in having an ultra-fast emulator if it doesn't run the games people want to play. As I see it, I have to keep working on both of these things - in the long term, it doesn't make sense to concentrate on one and not the other.

I think the best approach is to alternate on work between the two areas. R9 saw significant speed improvements, but almost no progress with compatibility, so I'm currently leaning towards trying to get a few of the more popular titles running. But you're the ones who are going to be using the emulator, so I want to hear your views on what I should work on next.

Please reply to this post with your opinions on what I should work on next. Have a good play with R9 to see what's changed - maybe some things are working better than you expected. Maybe some things are no longer working? Here are a few suggestions:


Speed. Make it faster generally? Is there a specific game that runs slowly which you'd like to see an improvement with?
Compatibility. Should I work on FlashRAM support? Is there a specific game that doesn't boot, or crashes the emulator? Does your favourite game boot, but then crash when you try to start playing?
Audio. The audio support is quite new. Are there certain games where it doesn't work? Should I try to improve the audio so it's less choppy?
Graphics. Maybe your favourite game runs, but there are significant graphical glitches?

Save Games. Save game support is currently 'in' for EEPROM and MemPak based saves, but very flaky. Should I work on improving this so you don't lose your hard-earned progress?
Savestate. Would it be better for me to implement savestate support, so you can save an resume a game at any point?
As I mentioned earlier, I'm going to be away all next week, but I'll try to post as many comments as I can before then. When I get back I'll work through the comments and announce what I'm going to concentrate on for R10

-StrmnNrmn ...