Richie B has hung up the boots?

jetboy

October 15, 2016...

'As readers have no doubt figured out for themselves at this point the various applications on this web site have not seen active development in some years. My interest in programming has gradually waned over the last decade, and while I'm still writing occasional code for my own interest (not least the back-end system behind my coaster pages) it is unlikely that projects listed here will see major development in the future.

...

So long, and thanks for all the fish.'

Probably nothing new for most (I missed the news by a few months), but to
me this is pretty monumental. I can't think of anybody else who has ported/developed so many emulators for any single platform. As a kid all my friends were playing the hottest new PC games... I was using Richie B's emulators the whole time. I have a heap of respect for everything he has delivered over the years.

I haven't seen RB on here for years, but thanks for everything mate and all the best! I'm in no way sad or disappointed to hear this. I had a great childhood playing games while RB did all the coding (something I could never get the hang of despite big dreams).

Thanks for an amazing childhood RB!

PS - RB's website says he is 30-something. I AM 30-SOMETHING NOW!!! Is RB Peter Pan?

_Em

Bannister would be in his late 30's now -- I remember back when he was in university (the Trinity trifecta :) He's been doing the security consultant thing for a number of years now; between singing, rollercoasters and network security, there's not much time left for significant software development.

However, all his work still exists, and works well under emulation :)

It's the close of an era that started ending long ago.

Lots more fish in the sea :)

Thundar

Does this mean emulator enhancer can be freeware now that his emus are old & he hung up his boots?

menace690

Realistically, thats entirely up to RB. I've seen no mention of such.

seanstar

That notice has been up for... a chunk of time now. Would have said years, but the date says otherwise. But yeah- we're all growing up; not surprising that other priorities come first, especially when most old systems (thanks in no small part to RB) have cycle-correct full-speed emulation on Mac, and the newer ones... are almost too complex to make emulation dents in.

I should shoot him a new EE registration for my new MacPro just to see what happens :D

Richard Bannister

For the record, I've never owned a pair of boots.

Bannister would be in his late 30's now

Thank you for reminding me!

Does this mean emulator enhancer can be freeware now that his emus are old & he hung up his boots?

I'm not planning to make Emulator Enhancer freeware; sorry about that. Fifteen years of my life went into it (if you include its predecessor Blitter Library) and I'm still selling a few licenses each week.

I should shoot him a new EE registration for my new MacPro just to see what happens

Feel free :)

seanstar

Hey Richard! Many thanks for your contributions over the years; way back to the "simulate NTSC artefacts" feature which iirc I pitched for Genesis/MegaDrive before I even knew much of anything about emulation and video standards, and which showed up in EE some arbitrary time later even though initially it seemed kinda lame to you.

I may still re-register anyway (although I must say, OpenEmu is pretty slick...), but I would absolutely be willing to throw double or triple the usual registration fee to get one very probably simple feature either in Oswan or EE:

screen rotation.
Literally, just take the game's usual render buffer and rather than blitting pixels between pixels to make the final window content bigger, just pop the whole thing in a 90-degrees-left transformation matrix to make the final window content sideways.

Even on perfect emulation, games like Magical Drop, Beatmania, and portions of Rockman & Forte are not practically playable because they rely upon the WonderSwan's unique gimmick of turning the unit 90 degrees counterclockwise.

If you literally do not have a machine that can build the code anymore, I totally understand (I'm running into that problem myself with a few older projects these days). But if you do, there's still that one small emulation-quality never-been-done-before (to my knowledge...) achievement to unlock :)

Also, were you party to any of the original Oswan dev docs, or did you mainly just poke at the code until it built on Mac? I've found some fairly complete tech/homebrew docs for WS, but they have s few holes specifically in the sound system which, based on the state of emulation, I've got to believe someone somewhere must know.

Richard Bannister

I just had a play with Oswan, and it looks like the games you mention are rotated automatically? Just resize your window...?

seanstar

I think I may have found some games to work myself, but I just just repro'd in Oswan 0.8.1 on Rockman & Forte.
Completing the intro stage (landscape) and then selecting AirconMan (game turns portrait) still results in everything showing up in sideways-landscape.

Can try again in 0.8.2. 0.8.1 (at least on/by Sierra) also seems to have developed a freeze-state bug; quick-freezing by hotkey reports that the file was created but could not set proper type info; quick-defrosting pops the defrost overlay but restores no state.