[Tuxnes-devel] Portable TuxNES (was: SDL audio player)

[W. M. P. <mi...@fl...>]

>> Nofrendo seems pretty nice -- I hadn't heard of that project.  At first
>> look, it appears quite portable.  It now seems to me that there are a
>> lot of competing NES emulators which are very similar.  Could someone
>> explain the reason for this?  Perhaps you could start with why TuxNES
>> forked from its parent project.  Jim, why did you port the nofrendo engine
>> to TuxNES instead of just modifying nofrendo to run on the Dreamcast?

> 	I can't fill you in on Jim's motivations, but I can tell you how
> TuxNES got its start. I needed an NES emulator that ran under Linux and
> could capture screenshots during gameplay. No available emulators fit the
> bill. But Nestra was opensource and easily modified for the task. I added
> a few more features and tried to roll them back into the main tree. But I
> feared that the Nestra maintainer no longer existed on the internet (I
> learned later that I was wrong) and so I forked a new project. That was
> almost 3 years ago.
> 
> 	One direction I had wanted to take TuxNES was to make a better,
> smarter dyn-rec core that would be easier to port to other platforms. But
> I never could get deep into that research.
> 
> 	As for why Jim did not port nofrendo, I don't believe the nofrendo
> source was generally available Jim began his effort.

I would like a NES emulator which is as portable as possible, while
remaining reasonably quick and light.  Specifically, in this case
portable means ``able to run on a UNIX-like OS on any architecture''
to me.  After looking around a bit more, I have a couple of options:

1.  Clean up Jim Ursetto's Dreamcast port and re-add TuxNES's SDL, X11,
etc. renderers.

2.  Move Jim Ursetto's C NES interpreter into the TuxNES code tree
(actually a little different process than step 1 -- TuxNES has changed
a bit since the fork).

3.  Begin working on nofrendo.

4.  Fork my own NES emulator because my goal turns out to be incompatible
with everyone else's.  I'd like to avoid this, of course.

Regardless, some dialog between the involved parties would probably
benefit all.

Comments?  Want to help?

-- 
Mike

:wq