Development Bounties

[quartercast]

*Goes downstairs and inspects his racks of vintage snes9x and goomba*

 

[hedwards]

Emulators will naturally mature with time. No one HAS to work on the OS/firmware....

I don't get your reasoning... No one HAS to work on emulators, either.

-God Ginrai

RenegadeChic put it pretty well, emulators tend to be about making a name for oneself, there's naturally an incentive to put something out there. There's a lot of geekery and analyzing which to some people is in and of itself compensation. Then there's the folks that work on it because there's that one game that they want to play and can't.

You can always throw in money if there's a challenging bit that needs doing or there's an excessive amount of optimization work if need be.

 

[MarkoeZ]

proper Flash seems to come up pretty frequently, and is something i would like.

If any bounties were put up for emulators, they could ask around if any developers of existing emulators are willing to do the task for the specified bounty first(within an X amount of time). That way they have a way of making some money with the stuff they did, and otherwise it's open market.

 

[xpansive]

Flash.

 

[hedwards]

Perhaps we can get a wiki page, if I haven't missed an already existing one, properly covering things that need doing. And if items of importance hang on there for too long or cry out for dev fund money, those get get bountied.

 

[Nekura20x6]

Totally valid bounty:

1. Flash (to the point where it can play Total Distortion)

Personal wants that probably don't warrant one (but would like anyway):

1. Port of Rise of the Triad
2. Solid versions of the PSX and N64 emus
3. Evolving MAME port (that keeps pace with the official release)
4. DAPHNE

I know development bounties are normally sponsored by the hardware vendor, but is there a mechanism for we users to post our own bounties. I wouldn't mind kicking into some of the more selfish requests if it would entice a developer to take them on over other projects.

 

[God Ginrai]

Emulators will naturally mature with time. No one HAS to work on the OS/firmware....

I don't get your reasoning... No one HAS to work on emulators, either.

-God Ginrai

RenegadeChic put it pretty well, emulators tend to be about making a name for oneself, there's naturally an incentive to put something out there. There's a lot of geekery and analyzing which to some people is in and of itself compensation. Then there's the folks that work on it because there's that one game that they want to play and can't.

You can always throw in money if there's a challenging bit that needs doing or there's an excessive amount of optimization work if need be.

Oftentimes that is true. But sometimes there are times when no dev is willing to stick their head in. The equivalent for the Pandora will probably be DS emulation, on the GP2X it was N64 emulation. Yes, I know that there eventually was an N64 emulator, but it was ported as a POC and never actually had any development put to it, and that was at least 3 years after release. I don't want to start up an argument about whether it was actually possible or not to emulate N64 on the GP2X, but the point remains that there are some things that devs just won't touch without incentive, (or won't put effort into if touched) and emulators are no exception.

-God Ginrai

 

[God Ginrai]

one more thing: remember that so called professional guy from T.I that got his pay and didn't fix wifi issue... let's not go on that crap again...

Well, bounties are supposed to be supplied after the work is done. I don't recall people giving money to bounty hunters in advance before they caught the criminal.

-God Ginrai

 

[Eniko]

I say spend it on anything that gets more hardware acceleration exposed to developers. Getting the most out of the hardware will benefit all software across the board, and so seems like a better investment than anything else.

 

[kuru]

We need killer apps at the moment and PSX is iconic, it gets peoples attention big time and as soon as anyone tries to disrespect our baby we have a good argument and will likely be an end to anyone who doesn't believe in Pandora

Not IMO. I don't need to justify and/or defend the Pandora. The haters will eventually get it. And if they don't who cares.

Low power usage "mp3 mode" using low cpu clock and DSP for decoding? (BT for A2DP playback would be cool, not very low power though...)

Using the usb on the go port to actually SIMULATE A REAL USB CD-ROM, like how some mobile broadband adapters do with software, we could choose an iso from and SD and expose that to a computer, to install windows or linux. no need to burn cd's that gets scratched and burn again and again....

Proper battery management is a must for this device! Also I like the idea of faking a CD-ROM, very practical!

Hardware acceleration of everything would probably be the best thing for the Pandora at the moment.

Hardware support for sound in music players using the DSP.
Support for sound through the DSP and video through hardware in MPlayer etc.
Support for graphical plug-ins in emulators (mostly N64 and PSX emulators) using OpenGL and the hardware + the sound through the DSP too.

I would even put full hardware support before tweaking the power saving as this will all go a long way to increasing the battery life anyway.

+1

Flash IS a selling factor for many people. I also understand it's difficult. Seeing the N900 being mentioned a lot in this context as it has flash 9.x - I have watched a few videos of it running embedded flashplayer and it didn't look all too good :/ Is that a performance (as in overclocking) or a implementation issue?

 

[chame]

I am interested about using 100% the hardware. I mean:

Hardware video playing, scaling, deartifact, unblocking...
(For the flash videos arround there, we could use firefox + greasemonkey + totem. it works great in my other linux devices.)
Sound hardware using DSP is nice
opengl -> opengl es wrapper (easy openGL porting)
better wifi stability, wifi access point administration (ap, passwords, priorization of ap to connect)
Aircrack
Bluetooth support for everythinng (GPS support anyone tried?, headphones, mouse/keyboard, network, etc)
General bug fixing

I read michael is doing a hardware hacking guide, I am interested in this too. If there are more usb host connectors (internally) I want to use them.

And please, I know its hard to do but, we should try to make the proper documentation. mantain the wiki updated, the bug tracker, manuals, howtos... this is my main request

 

[icurafu]

http://xbmc.org/author/topfs2/

Check out topfs2's blog. He is porting XBMC to the beagleboard which is the same hardware as the Pandora. You could donate to him to include a Pandora branch.

 

[BaDToaD]

Personally, I would like to see some of the dev fund money go to rewarding the people who have already put so much work into the software, porting, the OS etc.

I agree 100%. Let's give the guys that have already put their heart and soul into the pandora a bit of a cash based pat on the back.

 

[craigix]

it doesn't seem right target fortheir donation (ie, porter is doing 1/100th the work of original team usually) and against bounties usually for easy stuff. Ie: dropping asm into snes emu isn't really hard and should not be bounties. Better menus for emus? Lame use of bounty.

No one has though have they, so if it's easy maybe you should do it and claim the money?

The Pandora isn't going the way of the Wiz where everything was just left half finished and abandoned, if we have to have bounties to achieve success then we will. That was the idea of the dev fund and now we're putting it in to use.

Once the main things are done they are done and we can all relax and enjoy the Pandora. I don't want to be waiting years for that situation and basing it on hope.

We need action now, we can't stand still.

 

[GizmoTheGreen]

it doesn't seem right target fortheir donation (ie, porter is doing 1/100th the work of original team usually) and against bounties usually for easy stuff. Ie: dropping asm into snes emu isn't really hard and should not be bounties. Better menus for emus? Lame use of bounty.

No one has though have they, so if it's easy maybe you should do it and claim the money?

The Pandora isn't going the way of the Wiz where everything was just left half finished and abandoned, if we have to have bounties to achieve success then we will. That was the idea of the dev fund and now we're putting it in to use.

Once the main things are done they are done and we can all relax and enjoy the Pandora. I don't want to be waiting years for that situation and basing it on hope.

We need action now, we can't stand still.

I think he would've if he had the time.
Money isn't going to change that.

Why give money to have it done now?
When it will happen gratis if we wait. that's the point of the community, and opensource, i think.
If you want to get things done faster for money, do it for the OS, and drivers, and such. Improve the pandora (operating) system, not the software thats supposed to be done for fun by the community.

I would like to agree with you cragix, you are very awesome, but at this point i have to disagree with you, sadly.

 

[SomeGuy99]

 

[PokeParadox]

A can of worms, seems to have been opened.
Personally if it leads to the overall improvement of things for the Pandora, I have little issue with it. It would probably be best used to entice people to tackle long/boring/difficult tasks... but I also understand that people would like other things to get done.

Perhaps it could be used in a competition type format... e.g.

Task of The Month: Use the DSP to speed up N64 Emulation (just random idea pulled out of my posterior for examples sake.)
Bounty: £100 ... or whatever related to difficulty of task (this could be decided upon beforehand)
If it gets done that person wins the prize, if not the money is available for another task.

I think the idea is fine, it's the approach we need to get right. But it is always difficult to please everyone.

 

[Pleng]

We don't need an ASM core is the SNES emulator... running my Pandora at a lower clock speed has no apprent affect on my battery life. What SNES really needs is screen scaling and a way to fix the tearing.

 

[jonai]

Not top priority to port but the port process itself should be fast.

Crawl-Stone-Soup
TOME4

these are nice games

 

[hedwards]

1. Port of Rise of the Triad

Umm, doesn't that already run under dosbox? I mean, I think that's how the good people over at GoG did it. I'll need to look into it, because last time I tried I wasn't having the performance issues that I just had trying it. No doubt it's a simple fix as I'm pretty sure that it's a matter of my computer being gunked up if not the default settings.