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Future of melonDS Oct 12th 2024, by Arisotura

Hello there. There hasn't been a whole lot of melonDS related activity lately. I've been completely caught in a different, but fun project. If you have seen my Github lately, you might have an idea what it's all about. It's actually an idea I've had since 2016: hacking the WiiU gamepad to run custom code on it, and trying to figure out what kind of cool things are possible. I made attempts back in 2016 and 2022, but never really got anywhere. However, 3 months ago I felt like making a more serious attempt (namely involving a FPGA board) and actually managed to get things done. I kinda want to make a non-melonDS blog to talk about that kind of projects, too -- there would be a lot to say. This project is really challenging and intellectually stimulating, which is all I love! Anyway, I digress. melonDS. I still need to finish fixing the bugs before we can release 1.0. I hope I'll manage to get myself to get there, given the way my focus and motivation works. First, thank you all for your kind comments! It means a lot. Next, the plans. As I mentioned before, I want to take a big break from melonDS after releasing 1.0. melonDS will be 8 years old, and that's a lot, especially for a project of mine. It has been a very good project and I've had a lot of fun, but I think I need to do other things for a while. However, melonDS isn't going to go dead. You might have noticed that Jakly has been contributing a lot of accuracy improvements to melonDS. The amount of research she has been putting into things like the 3D rasterizer, or lately the ARM CPUs themselves, researching all the weirdest quirks and trying to emulate them, has been astounding. Better than even I have done years ago. Not everything has been merged yet, because for some things it boils down to the cost vs benefits -- some can be included in melonDS without really hurting performance, but some would be more suited towards a 'developer' build. Regardless, it would make sense for Jakly to be my successor, in a way. I don't want to completely abandon melonDS, but you get the idea. I'll give her access to this blog so she can make juicy technical posts too. And of course, the rest of the team is still around too. While their contributions will largely depend on whether they feel as burnt-out as me, you can be sure melonDS isn't going dead anytime soon. I also want to finally finish the nightly builds section. My concern there was about versioning, but we have an idea for that. We'll add an About dialog to melonDS, with the full versioning information, so nightlies can be distinguished from release builds. Then I'll be able to open this up. That's all folks! See you in November for the 1.0 release.

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