Originally Posted by
Exophase
This post does deserve attention/clarification on my part, I probably owe an apology too. I do intend to make good on the money I was donated and buy a PSP Slim now that they've finally come down in price; I don't want anyone to think that I've tricked people on that. However, since I've gotten myself involved in other work before and during that time it could be a while still before I can really do that. I don't like doing "clean up" versions but that was pretty much what I said I'd do (ie, fixed some games, a few minor improvements, but nothing too major). I still don't have a Slim yet, of course.
If the people who donated feel ripped off by this I can refund them for the time being, sorry about that.
There's really no question at all that I get a lot more positive reception in the PSP scene than the GP2X scene because the PSP scene is just so much larger. I think hundreds of thousands of people have used gpSP, judging on download counts. I don't have a problem with a quantitative lack of appreciation because I have plenty of it. It's just the negative stuff that gets me down way too much, it's hard to deal with.
I think the biggest thing that bothers me about Takka's releases is that he implements things that I generally wouldn't have.
Some of these things I think are objectively useless. Some of them are more subjective - I can argue with why I think that the emulator shouldn't have them but a lot of people will want them anyway.
For instance TV out support. I'd rather encourage people to use a PC or an XBox or something for emulating GBA games on a big screen, not a PSP. But there are people who not only insist on it but complain like crazy when it's not there.
Then there's FF6 support. gpSP has had FF6 fixed for a really long time now (way before Takka released his version that played it), but I didn't bother because I want to encourage people to use the SNES version. FF6 had one of my favorite soundtracks of all times and the GBA version totally butchered it. You might argue that gpSP would emulate it faster, but the game totally rapes the GBA and gpSP has to skip a ton of frames in battle. If I'm going to release a version that plays it I want to at least make it faster.
Then you have lots of other little things that feel like they're added because they're done by someone who has time to waste and doesn't have to worry about the real issues involved in coding an emulator. Loading bars, when most things take no more than a couple seconds to load. Battery life/time display, when you get the same thing by pressing start. Configurable locations for directories in several separate files - do users really need to specify this so badly or could you just have fixed directories?
Most of these things feel like they have nothing to do with improving GBA emulation, and don't even really improve the emulator but they make it "feel" like it's more like other emulators. And people see this and feel like a lot of improvements have been done.
Now from my perspective for every time he does this I have to evaluate what he has done and then if I see that people will demand having it I have to go ahead and reimplement it. I can't use his code because he's pointlessly changed so many things in my code which I don't agree with (and it has a lot of Japanese comments), and yet the actual changes are trivial. But there are too many of them. The last time I sat down and reviewed his code changes it took me several hours, just so I could conclude that 90% of it was meaningless. I don't want to do that at all, I'd much rather just implement things myself.
This is what I did with gpSP 0.9 - I spent several months intensely debugging games (Mario & Luigi, Zelda, Mario & Donkey Kong, etc), then spent the last day implementing "Takka features" to make people happy. But I don't feel like doing this anymore. I don't WANT my emulator to have features that I think are lame, but if it doesn't then people are going to complain, people are going to insult me compared to him.
Seriously, I made a mistake making this GPL. I guess it just seemed like the natural thing to do and I knew my GPL zealot friends would chew me out if I didn't do it. When it comes to emulators I've spent so much time just reading source and so little time actually modifying it (nothing that I've ever publicly released, nor would I without contacting the author) that I figured that's what people would want with it. I was worried about this happening from the start but I determined that if I just put in the readme asking people not to do this that they wouldn't, and if they did I could talk them out of it. Guess not. Oh well.
When I get a Slim I might make a topic just to get an idea of what features gpSP 0.9 lacks that they actually want (whatever Takka's added), because I am not going to spend time reviewing his source again, that sounds like a nightmare. Unfortunately so many people have said that his versions are better or worse for reasons that are totally inaccurate, like that it plays games that work fine in 0.9 (Minish Cap for instance...) that I can't make sense of it. At this point I really don't even want to look at the version to get an idea of what it has. The whole thing is a mess.
I hope this makes some of my frustration clearer.
I really never intended to make a big announcement about scene participation but I see that's how it was taken as this was posted on several other places...
