Priorities as of August 5th, 2011

Well shoot. I guess version 1.0.0.0 will only work on 32 bit Windows 7. I’m not terribly surprised about 64-bit being an issue, but I am surprised that about Windows XP. Thanks for the feedback. I’ll look into it.

Here’s a general overview of my current set of priorities:
* Full screen (windowed mode).
* Fix WindowsXP.
* Fix 64 bit. I really hope I can get 64 and 32 bit systems to use the same EXE, but I’m a bit worried that I’ll have to have two different sets of deliverables.
* Save/Load NVRAM. (the 3DO save data).

After that, I will:
* Use OpenGL or SDL (for video). My winforms solution for video works, but it’s slow and wasteful.
* USB gamepad support. If I use SDL for video, I can use SDL for input as well.
* Fix/Improve Audio support (it gets very annoying if the framerate drops, which doesn’t happen to me any more, but slower machines would see it).
* Play from CD

I suspect all this will take over a month. If it goes really poorly or I’m less available I suppose it could even take 6 months. I believe the above items will get the emulator to a point where I no longer am the bottleneck of the operation. In other words, things would be at a state where others could jump in and help with the remainder. There is one big item that I can only do so much on.

This is the big item. As far as keeping the console alive, I consider it to be one of the most important:
* Start finding games that are incompatible or don’t load, and attempt to fix them. To set everyone’s expectations, this will be very slow and take a lot of work. I may have to add certain debugging features to the emulator to aid this effort. If anyone feels capable, they could help me in this.

Also this other stuff is less important to me:
* Multiple player support.
* Silly turbo buttons.
* The faux 640×480 support. Don’t be too disappointed with the low priority. It’s an intensive operation, so I believe games really only use it for static full screen images like loading screens. Also, it is not true high resolution, each original pixel just becomes a 2×2 pixel with different shades of the color (like blue vs. dark blue).