Jump to content
LaunchBox Community Forums

Emulator Cores - An open letter to the developers


robwired

Recommended Posts

3 minutes ago, robwired said:

Do I feel like I'm in the corner of your mom's basement holding up my shiny white iPhone as a cross to ward off a bunch of Lindows guys who are mad that I'm suggesting that we let a few of the pretty people join our birthday party?

 

A little...

That was just out of place now, please refrain from such comments.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I really like you guys.... you are VERY passionate! I'm not offended. If any of you are in the SF Bay Area let me know, drinks are on me!

At the end of the day, it's clear that Launchbox is intended to:

1) Make Emulation more fun

2) Make Emulation elegant and easy

I see that there are nods in the direction of making Launchbox easy and if the Libetro team has done most of the heavy lifting and will continue to do so, then it seems that this integration wouldn't be that hard.

Would someone that is more tech savvy than me check to see if this is the case with Libetro cores?

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Bottom line is this.

Could Launchbox (and emulators) be easier to setup ? Yes, of course they can.

But Launchbox is by far the easiest to set up frontend out there. It's the reason I paid for it when there are good free frontends out there. I am not a person afraid to get my hands dirty with software, tweaking and learning how to customize it.

Is it as easy as something like OpenEmu and EmulationStation for the Pi ? No of course not but like I said earlier, those systems hardware specs are locked in and there is very little to zero deviation in them which makes something like OpenEmu possible.

We might not have the simplest front end in existence but we do have the simplest and most feature rich on the Windows side of things.

 

It's not question of how hard it would be to integrate and package libretro cores but a case of how much time does Jason, the one person dev team have to work on that. It wouldn't just be a case of plugging in the cores and go, he would have write all the UI elements much like what Retroarch and OpenEmu have done. That is way more work than one person can be reasonably expected to handle.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I really appreciate this discussion guys. That said, I would also like to remind you guys, especially the moderators, that there is absolutely no reason to attack or come at anyone so forcefully. If I was @robwired, I would have been offended, pissed off, and left a long time ago. We need to handle these situations better than that. I don't believe it's necessary for me to point anyone out, but moderators especially, please tone it down. Disagreeing with someone's request is no reason to respond so forcefully.

Now that that's said, let's have a civilized discussion. I would love to see LaunchBox be able to distribute cores for all the various emulators and have them *just work*. Is it actually feasible? Certainly not right now but maybe long-term in the future it might be. I share the notion that we want LaunchBox to be as easy as possible, and emulator installation and configuration is definitely a pain point right now.

@lordmonkus did get a lot right though in his responses; the amount of extra effort required in order to make that happen is massive. Sure, the code is written for the cores, but we'd basically have to code an easier version of Retroarch itself in order to make it happen. So sadly, it's not feasible in the short term. But longer term, it is something exciting to keep in mind. I still shutter at the likely licensing and legality issues of it all though, too.

  • Like 4
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, Jason Carr said:

I really appreciate this discussion guys. That said, I would also like to remind you guys, especially the moderators, that there is absolutely no reason to attack or come at anyone so forcefully. If I was @robwired, I would have been offended, pissed off, and left a long time ago. We need to handle these situations better than that. I don't believe it's necessary for me to point anyone out, but moderators especially, please tone it down. Disagreeing with someone's request is no reason to respond so forcefully.

Now that that's said, let's have a civilized discussion. I would love to see LaunchBox be able to distribute cores for all the various emulators and have them *just work*. Is it actually feasible? Certainly not right now but maybe long-term in the future it might be. I share the notion that we want LaunchBox to be as easy as possible, and emulator installation and configuration is definitely a pain point right now.

@lordmonkus did get a lot right though in his responses; the amount of extra effort required in order to make that happen is massive. Sure, the code is written for the cores, but we'd basically have to code an easier version of Retroarch itself in order to make it happen. So sadly, it's not feasible in the short term. But longer term, it is something exciting to keep in mind. I still shutter at the likely licensing and legality issues of it all though, too.

Just want to say that I wasn't offended at all which is why I made the joke to lighten up the mood. Your moderators are very passionate and protective of Launchbox and you. You picked a great staff, I'm honestly a little jealous.

Getting to the truth of the matter at the end of the day is what it's all about!

  • Like 4
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm sorry if anyone was offended, as that wasn't my intention, but I won't apologize for voicing my opinion, even if that opinion puts me at odds with anyone (or everyone) else. It's not much of a discussion if everyone agrees. If that dissent was conveyed too forcefully, well then my apologies. I just thought the joke was a bit inappropriate to be honest.

Rob seems like a good guy. We chatted for a bit and everything was civil :)

I'm very open to suggestions, honestly. I'm not dogmatic - obviously there's always room for improvement, and those potential improvements should be encouraged. I encourage people to post their ideas on feature requests on Bitbucket almost daily. I won't blindy agree with/endorse anything though, and if it's something I disagree with, I'm going to say as much, and in detail (I feel like you have to otherwise it's just being argumentative for its own sake). That said, I'm strongly opinionated and yes, as Rob put it, passionate; passionate because this is a product and a community that I care about and want to see thrive. Sometimes that results in more vehemence than is necessary or, honestly, intended.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 minutes ago, Zombeaver said:

I'm sorry if anyone was offended, as that wasn't my intention, but I won't apologize for voicing my opinion, even if that opinion puts me at odds with anyone (or everyone) else. It's not much of a discussion if everyone agrees. If that dissent was conveyed too forcefully, well then my apologies. I just thought the joke was a bit inappropriate to be honest.

Rob seems like a good guy. We chatted for a bit and everything was civil :)

I'm very open to suggestions, honestly. I'm not dogmatic - obviously there's always room for improvement, and those potential improvements should be encouraged. I encourage people to post their ideas on feature requests on Bitbucket almost daily. I won't blindy agree with/endorse anything though, and if it's something I disagree with, I'm going to say as much, and in detail (I feel like you have to otherwise it's just being argumentative for its own sake). That said, I'm strongly opinionated and yes, as Rob put it, passionate; passionate because this is a product and a community that I care about and want to see thrive. Sometimes that results in more vehemence than is necessary or, honestly, intended.

I apologized for not catching the joke. Honestly if this was reddit or something like that I would have probably answered with another joke. I love dark humor a lot. I am just inexperienced in this thing of moderating and my first reaction was to try to prevent this to become a drama thread

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 months later...

Thought I'd add my two cents as well...

I couldn't agree with @robwired more. I feel the same way. I want to keep the tinkering and open aspect of current LB, but also have the simplicity of OpenEmu.

Everyone is making good points, but I still agree with just about everything @robwired has said.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Unfortunately, your content contains terms that we do not allow. Please edit your content to remove the highlighted words below.
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...