VBA-S [S as in Spacy]

[Squall-Leonhart]

well it appears spacey has buggered off.

[KingHanco]

He probably quit just like all the other guys. I understand that they want a life instead of keep working on this. Happy retired Spacy.

[Squall-Leonhart]

honestly, if they don't intend on seeing a project through, dont take it on in the first place.

[TheCloudOfSmoke]

Emulation is easier said than done. Of course they want to get as far as they can but after a few years, it becomes more of a job than a hobbie with all of the noobs demanding stuff all of the time and people complaining about XXX game does not work. Life might have been easier when they first started out but then after a while they might want to take on a new project and one that might involve being payed for their years of effort so that they have more of an incentive to continue on. Or they might have more responsibility or personal stuff that they need to work on. We all should be fortunate that we were able to have the VBA and that it's at the current state that it is when they abandoned it. Anyways, it's open source so it's not like they are the only ones who are able to work on it like ePSXe, if you want to finish the project, well then be our guest.

[Squall-Leonhart]

the current state that spacey left it is pathetic, there are core timing issues, and he has ripped opengl rendering right from it, the best build to use is still 1.7.2

[KingHanco]

Na Na

Na Na

Hey Hey

Goodbye VBA group.

VBA will be forever unstable.

[Aided Onslaught]

Squall, You have a very negative thing going on, I don't much like it. You act as if he should finish it, and that it was stupid for him to even try. It's not like he was getting paid, or even that it needed to be done. He just came along and wanted to mess with it.

Also just because someone didn't finish something, doesn't mean someone else can't. Even a little work can help get somethign where it "needs" to be.

[Squall-Leonhart]

he could have atleast dropped us a message saying hes not working on it anymore, instead of leaving us hanging.

thats all im saying.

maybe someone else would've picked it up by now if he had.....

[Aided Onslaught]

Only thing I can say to that is life could have gotten in the way. It could be something good, or terrible that happened. Either way a forum about games wouldn't really matter.

[Spacy]

Hiho, seems as you guys are a bit unhappy about things currently.

As some of you "may" have noticed, there were not any changes for quite a while.

Fortunately this is not caused by getting sick or dying

My reason for it is, that I have less spare time, don't know much about emulation itself, am totaly alone on the project and, quite importantly, do not know of any very good GBA games to work for.
Well, I also don't get paid for it, but I wouldn't even accept the job if being paid as long as I'm not very interested anymore.


And it seems like other developers are not interested as well. If one is, then just let me know about it via PM and I'll try to give you access to the CVS.



But still, I am not saying, that I really, finally leave the crew, I am just suspending from my "job", maybe coming back if I feel like it.


Best regards,
spacy

[Squall-Leonhart]

no problems spacy,

...id take up the project myself.. but i have sweet f.a knowledge about programming or the emulator :P

[warstoke]

personaly i think that as far as the gba is concerned that mostly what we need is somone who is good at optimizing the code to make it faster smoother and more efficient
the same thing all major platforms need
but me im not that good at much other than interface work

[Squall-Leonhart]

stability and compatibility also matter.

but there is some skipping issues with the 1.8 betas forgotten worked on, and spaceys builds suffer the same issues. (ie, in some games, you would get a slow, fast, slow, fast issue,.. but only when using filtering... this wasn't evident on older 1.7 builds.

[Spacy]

Well, in my opinion, someone should restart from 1.7.2 and try to eliminate the remaining bugs to create a 1.7.3 stable. Than someone else could have a look at the changes made at the current CVS code.

[Squall-Leonhart]

indeed, 1.7.2 is still the best release in terms of speed + stability.

[dramo1]

Hi guys,

I've just PMed Spacy RE: taking over the VBA project.

I'm interesting in overhauling parts of the emulator as well as re-focusing on speed, and if that means going back to the 1.7.x branch then that's what we'll do Basically if I'm not allowed to join the official team I'll be forking my own branch and continuing development that way.

I've had a look at the forum and the bug tracker on Sourceforge. My initial thoughts are that I need to go through the countless threads on this forum and see if there's any useful information to fix existing bugs. Secondly I need to check through the bug tracker and take a look at applying the patches in the tracker which haven't been acknowledged yet.

I think VBA still has a lot of potential, but there are some useless features I'd like to remove, focusing heavily on core functionality.

So let me know what you all think. Irrespective of public interest, I want to pick this project up

Thanks,

Daniel

[Xtreme2damax]

Off-Topic

@Squall-Leonhart:


Are you the Same Squall-Leonhart at emutalk?

If you are, man this is a small world/community, I didn't know people spent so much time on different emulation forums.

Continue On-Topic Discussion

[TheCloudOfSmoke]

Do you think you are up to the challenge dramo1? It would great to see the VBA back in development. Take the source, see what you can do with it and get back to us. I don't think that you need permission as long as you follow the rules of the license and keep it open source. If you really want to join the official team though, pm forgotton since it still is his emulator. I'd hate to see such a magnificant peice of software like the VBA just die. Be careful though, you shouldn't take away any features. That may upset some people and is like downgrading it in a way. Just add on to what's already there. Just my suggestion though. My opinion doesn't really matter. But anyways, good luck.

@Xtreme: Emulation is not a just hobby, it's a lifestyle. Yeah, I know that was corny. That's all I really do on the internet. I check other non emulation related things on the internet but emulations is my main thing.

[dramo1]

Originally Posted by TheCloudOfSmoke

Do you think you are up to the challenge dramo1? It would great to see the VBA back in development. Take the source, see what you can do with it and get back to us. I don't think that you need permission as long as you follow the rules of the license and keep it open source. If you really want to join the official team though, pm forgotton since it still is his emulator. I'd hate to see such a magnificant peice of software like the VBA just die. Be careful though, you shouldn't take away any features. That may upset some people and is like downgrading it in a way. Just add on to what's already there. Just my suggestion though. My opinion doesn't really matter. But anyways, good luck.

@Xtreme: Emulation is not a just hobby, it's a lifestyle. Yeah, I know that was corny. That's all I really do on the internet. I check other non emulation related things on the internet but emulations is my main thing.

Thanks for your input. Yeah I think I'm up to it At the moment the source isn't organised very well, so my idea to remove certain 'extra' functionality was to take VBA back to a stage where the core emulation is the focus. Then once the speed bugs which plagued the 1.8.x series are resolved, said features can be re-implemented (in a different/more efficient way if necessary). The kind of functionality I speak of are things like customizing your own keyboard shortcuts, skin support, and temporarily removing the graphical filters so as to find out what's going on with the use of D3D/DDraw/OGL/SDL/whatever :P

BTW I'm inclined to ditch D3D/DDraw entirely in favour of OGL... but we'll see what happens -- it's still early days, I'm not gonna make any crazy promises just yet

But if anyone has any ideas or requests, or would like to help out, just let me know here or via PM or e-mail... or MSN even.

EDIT: I'm definitely forking. There's no way my changes would even be considered on the official branch To start with, I'm removing Linux/SDL support entirely, as well as everything I mentioned above. The plan is to eventually (and I mean eventually) add NDS support. Visit NitroBoy Development Blog for updates.

[Spacy]

Hi, I just replied to your PM, but I saw too late that you'll fork either way. I would still be happy if I could give you CVS access so you could try to give some things back to the official branch. On the other hand, who the hell is interested in the official version, anyway?

I really do support your opinion on removing useless stuff, so VBA would be much more platform-independant from the same code base.
I think the GB and the GBA core also need some kind of seperation, because it would be great if they just could be compiled seperately if wished. I also think that forking is the best thing to do for you, so you have all the freedom you want. But I think you should not currently think about the NDS. I think VBA should always stay a GBA emulator, I also do not care about GB/GBC. One thing for one purpose, that's how it should be.

Good luck, keep up the spirit