Do Software Bounties Work?

[satanic virus]

I will be glad to give 50$ for a fully working MZ800 emulator, but I know that is nothing compared to the hours of work a dev needs to put into it. So I don't expect this to motivate any developer.
If someone came up to me and would ask me if I wanted to earn 50$ and I had to do my daily job in my spare time for a couple of weeks, I would think the guy was nuts. That said, doing something fun in my spare time and earning 50$ could be interesting.

I'd add €75 to anyone who develops a fully working MZ-700/800 emulator - on either 2X or Pandora when released! Maybe if we get enough donators someone might eventually port one?!

 

[dcpmark]

I offered a $100 bounty, payable through PayPal, for a frontend that can show all games in all emulators and launch any game, regardless of emulator. Some people offered to add to the bounty, but no one took me up on it. I don't remember how much it got up to....

Umm... You do realise JyCet's Enexfi can do this? Maybe you could pay up...



I'll give it a try, but I don't believe this is what I'm talking about. The frontend I'm looking for should be a list of games, not emulators, show what platform it is for in the column next to it so I can see which emulator version I want to play, and would be able to launch individual games from the list from OUTSIDE the individual emulators. This was all mentioned in the bounty, and universally accepted at that time that no one had done it yet.

So, on this frontend, it would look something like this, and I could launch each game from this list:

Game...........................Platform..........Emulator..........Speed

Hellfire...........................Genesis.........DrMD..........250mhz
Hellfire...........................Arcade.........MAME GP2X..........225mhz
Hellfire...........................SNES..........PocketSNES..........250mhz
SuperBaseball 2020.........Genesis...........PicoDrive...........250mhz
SuperBaseball 2020.........NEOGEO...........GNGEO2X............250mhz

Sorry...I don't know how to properly space the columns. If Enexfi does this, I WILL send my $100 right away......

 

[Vilmos]

Hmm, well I'm currently trying a software bounty of a sort...I just made a thread then saw this.

Anyway free dev kit for a developer to create a homebrew game.

Hopefully it works and one more game is added.

 

[Firefox]

Bounties actively put me off, to be honest. It smacks of being hired for very low wages, though I'm sure people don't mean it that way at all.

Things that would be an incentive would be things that show some recognition after the fact... People sending you music CDs if they like your work, or something.

 

[quasist]

I believe that most of bounties are crawling behind curtain of gp2x scene.
For example:
how much headhunter wants for craig's head?
How much sony will spent to cease all of incoming pandoras' production?

You know, Bobba Phett wasn't a quite gp2x coder

 

[Blah]

I'm pretty sure Sony isn't concerned about the Pandora, hell they probably don't even know it exists. And they wouldn't care anyways, they're more involved in the PS3 and Blu-Ray (is that spelled right, I think the main problem with it is it's hard to spell).