Re: [Tuxnes-devel] SDL audio player

[Jim U. <ji...@3e...>]

At 11:14am on 2002 May 03, Mike Melanson did write:
> On Fri, 3 May 2002, W. Michael Petullo wrote:
> > Jim, why did you port the nofrendo engine to TuxNES instead of just
> > modifying nofrendo to run on the Dreamcast?
 
> 	As for why Jim did not port nofrendo, I don't believe the nofrendo
> source was generally available Jim began his effort.

Here are my reasons:

- I had worked with nestra even before TuxNES was forked.  I intended to
  produce proof-of-concept code utilizing a tile-based engine, accelerated
  with my 3dfx card.  Which I did.  Open-source NES emulators are a recent
  phenomenon; nestra was the only good one I could find at the time.
- Years later, intending to do the same on the Dreamcast, I looked for
  nestra and found TuxNES.  I knew nestra in great detail, so it seemed
  ideal.  In retrospect, it may have been faster to port another emulator.
  But even then TuxNES was the only -good- open NES emu out there.
  Nester et al were still closed source.  Nofrendo -may- have been open,
  but Matt Conte seemed to have dropped off the map.

I tried keep the Dreamcast port integrated in the original TuxNES code, but
the burden of compatibility became too large.  TuxNES's portability also
makes the code hard to follow (at least for me) and the #ifdefs for the DC
obfuscated it more.  So I scrapped code that was not sufficiently
abstracted.  But I did keep the plug-in model when possible--e.g. the DC
has two separate renderers, "dc" and "dc-tile".  I also made the sound
engine a plug-in, adding "oss", "dc", "mute", and "none" outputs.

Personally, I would try to simplify main().  It's one hell of a function,
and it needs to be broken out into smaller functions.  I did this to some
extent in tuxnes-dc.  But again, some code I replaced outright, because
abstracting it was too much work at the time.  I'd like to see, for
example, the separate renderer/palette/sample_format selection code
factored out into one reusable function.  (I tried this, and failed.)  This
would aid not only readability but portability, especially to non-POSIX
systems, although the latter perhaps does not concern you as much.

-- 
"When I was a child, I did things as a child.
 Now that I'm a man, I bust your ass and get wild." --Black Sheep/Freak Y'all
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