Frequently Asked Questions

General

Why write an emulator?

Why do artists paint? See Raison d'être.

Can I play game X?

Probably not; see SupportedGames to be disappointed.

When is the next release?

Sorry, but no promises on anything. I’m a full-time student and also have a part-time job; at the end of the day I'm pretty worn out. That said, I really like this project and want to get some cool stuff done with it, and to that end I'm willing to work as much as possible. Remember that this is a hobby, so I may wander around the problem domain and do things that interest me and they may not necessarily help with what you want to do.

Features

When will you do feature X?

See Todo for a list of things I plan on doing in the near-term, and WouldBeCool for the things in the long-term (or ideally, what other people would help with). If it's not on those lists it does not mean it hasn't been thought of, just that it isn't a high priority yet.

What about speed?

Things are pretty fast. There's some room for improvement (especially in the CPU), but Puzzle Bobble runs at 350FPS on my Core Duo 2.1ghz laptop.

Distribution

Why don't you offer a download?

I will, just not now. It's too early to be useful to most people, and although I believe in the Release-Early/Release-Often philosophy I also think undercooked builds are annoying. How many times have you grabbed a demo or something that turned out to be unusable in any fashion? I'd rather not turn people off to the project just because not enough time has gone by yet. Rest assured that once a commercial game or two is playable there will be a release.

I downloaded your emulator off of ...

If you trust them that's great. If you don't, be careful. It's trivial for someone with even the crappiest of skills to inject some pretty dangerous stuff in to an application, and due to the nature of this particular application there isn't much I can do about it (meaning it needs full access to unsafe code, all the disk/video resources, etc). I recommend sticking to either this site or one of the biggies for your binary downloads, when available. I would strongly advise against downloading anything from Usenet, BitTorrent, or IRC, although I reserve the right to retract that statement if my server starts getting hammered and I can’t keep up ^_^.

Development

Why release the code?

Because it’s just more fun that way! That, and I hate to see projects I like die away because the developer got bored/got a job/moved to China and there's nothing that can be done about it. Also, you can think of publicly available source code as a distributed backup system.

Why .NET/C#/Visual Studio/etc?

This project is my hobby and the last thing I want to do in my spare time was use a language or environment I don't enjoy (I code on Macs during the day, and that's enough pain ^_^). I like C#, and I love Visual Studio. Just about any argument you can create against it can be countered, so don't even try. If you don't like it, you don't have to use it; I know that this is certainly my philosophy with other languages/environments!

This is awesome! Need help?

Why, yes I do, actually. Check out WouldBeCool and Porting for some ideas.

Miscellaneous

How can I contact you?

There are many ways, but few are good. I'll delete any annoying mails I get, and submit any stupid ones to CloudMark. I recommend posting me a private message on the PS2Dev forums, as that is where I'd like to keep things.