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Beyond "for the fun of it", what is the purpose of this? So that hackers can run other hackers' games? Why not spend that effort writing games for an open plat

Beyond "for the fun of it", what is the purpose of this? So that hackers can run other hackers' games? Why not spend that effort writing games for an open platform like the web, or for iOS/Android and have the possibility to make money? I'm not trying to criticize bunnei's work, I'm just generally curious if this is a "because I can" hacker project, or if there is actually a demand in the community to write DS games.

Danieru 12y ago
In my experience the emulator development community is driven in large part by the "because I can" mentality. Developers do play games but mostly for debugging. Once an emulator is "done" they move on to a harder console. For example ppsspp was started by the same guy who started Dolphin. When I hung out on the ppsspp irc I found several other developers were present or former Dolphin devs. The users tend to be very game-playing focused which is part of why the user&developer relationship is so strained. Users are the pathological worst customers, the ones patio11 keeps mentioning, they are cheap and demand the sky. Meanwhile the developers are managing immense complexity and no one is getting a paycheck. It makes everything much easier to understand when you hear of developers quiting. That anyone creates anything is amazing.
z3phyr 12y ago
Everything is not done to just have the possibility to make money. I played with the ants (real ones) for endless period of time, and I can honestly say, I enjoyed that time very much. Then I wrote a basic ant colony simulation, which did not ran properly or crashed! Two years later Rich Hickey made a similar (and far better) ant simulation program. You might not be very surprised when you read what that effort directly gave me. Nothing! But Indirectly I grew my interests in Simulations, Video Games which lead to my discovery of a field called Machine Learning, AI and Robotics. I have no real job today, I am still getting ready for college, and I don't know what I will really do in the future. What I know is I can learn.

Danieru 12y ago

In my experience the emulator development community is driven in large part by the "because I can" mentality. Developers do play games but mostly for debugging. Once an emulator is "done" they move on to a harder console. For example ppsspp was started by the same guy who started Dolphin. When I hung out on the ppsspp irc I found several other developers were present or former Dolphin devs. The users tend to be very game-playing focused which is part of why the user&developer relationship is so strained. Users are the pathological worst customers, the ones patio11 keeps mentioning, they are cheap and demand the sky. Meanwhile the developers are managing immense complexity and no one is getting a paycheck. It makes everything much easier to understand when you hear of developers quiting. That anyone creates anything is amazing.

z3phyr 12y ago

Everything is not done to just have the possibility to make money. I played with the ants (real ones) for endless period of time, and I can honestly say, I enjoyed that time very much. Then I wrote a basic ant colony simulation, which did not ran properly or crashed! Two years later Rich Hickey made a similar (and far better) ant simulation program. You might not be very surprised when you read what that effort directly gave me. Nothing! But Indirectly I grew my interests in Simulations, Video Games which lead to my discovery of a field called Machine Learning, AI and Robotics. I have no real job today, I am still getting ready for college, and I don't know what I will really do in the future. What I know is I can learn.