Correspondence with FreeDO

Altmer provided me with some helpful information. He tells me that the FreeDO source that is available on google code includes many of the improvements from FreeDO 2.1. As far as 4DO is concerned, that’s great news.

He is also working on a “new” emulator. New as in not FreeDO. One of the things he intends to include is the hardware accelerated graphics (which I referred to on another thread). I don’t really know what else the new emulator involves other than a rewrite. He also figures it would be difficult to work together on it. Considering the language barrier, I have to agree. Altmer provided clarification that his new emulator will NOT be open source, but that the interface to it will be. He also said he could try to keep the interface similar to the one FreeDO had so that I could more easily use it with something like 4DO. That’s a minor point. But, that’s all the info I have.

So, it looks like there is no FreeDO development going on whatsoever, and FourDO is using the latest copy. Altmer is working on a new, different (low-level) emulator, and meanwhile I’m adding features to 4DO to basically produce a more swanky version of FreeDO. Hopefully some day in the future, Altmer’s new emulator is released and a clear improvement, and 4DO or something like it can help out by plugging in and padding out the interface with features. As far as I know, that sums up the only 3DO emulation development going on in the world.

Back in 4DO land, I have been working on getting CD-Rom support online. Some games load just fine. For some reason, on other games I’ll get a “give up” error visible on the screen after it fails to load. I think this may be the copy protection I’ve heard about. I have noticed that 2.1 FreeDO does not have the problem, so I am going to try to iron out what I’m missing.