While porting an emulator, often times it’s helpful to see how authors of other ports handle certain challenges. Over time, a number of small issues have prompted me to look for possible answers in other applications.
Quite often, source code for a similar port is freely available. Too often, however, it’s not. The surprising thing is that the people who hide the source code aren’t the authors of the emulator – it’s the authors of the port.
As someone who works off of open-source (not necessarily by any official definition) projects, I welcome all private developers to use my code and learn from it–my only request is that copied code is given proper credit.
I would like to see all authors that port open-source software release their code. This is especially relevant to the PSP subculture, as the availability of documentation is relatively scarce. Your work will help others, and will gain your port more popularity, as others will acknowledge your contribution.
Hiding code for a pending “cleanup” (which frequently, never happens) shouldn’t be reason enough to hide it. Even kludgy code is better than no code.
Tags: cleanup, closed source, open source
Totally agree with you…
It is also a shame when lame coders release opensource emulators without any credits, hiding the sourcecode for some obscure reasons, only to try to grab some virtual popularity… I heard that the PSP scene had his lot of rats
I myself work actually on the NGC port of SMSPlus (and GenesisPlus also, it could be your next challenge on PSP perhaps ?), and modified some of the original code to improve compatibility/accuracy. Sourcecode is available here: https://smsplus-gx.bountysource.com/
I agree, I’ve noticed that tendency too (to release ports without proper credit to original authors). I imagine that’s why many emulator authors choose to keep their source closed.
I actually have a semi-finished crude port of Genesis Plus for PSP. I never got around to finishing it because I’m not really happy with the performance (it lags even at 333Mhz).