Release DraStic Nintendo DS emulator


Exophase said:
Jarvis said:
I understand and respect it. Don't you know any person from maemo.org? Maybe is somone here who can do this? Pandora and N900 are similar because of linux.
Click to expand...
I haven't been there, but there's probably some cross over between members there and members here, including some developers.
Click to expand...
A relatively close friend of mine has done some porting work for Maemo, he could probably help me setting it up.
 
slaeshjag said:
A relatively close friend of mine has done some porting work for Maemo, he could probably help me setting it up.
Click to expand...
Great, it's all yours if you want it. Naturally I trust you, or if I didn't it's too late now ;) Do you have an N900 already or do you need to get one?

JePP said:
Is there anyone else playing Pokemon? I for one would be glad for a quick Octoberfest fix, but of course it's no biggie so if it just takes up too much time, I'm fine of course for the "proper" next release :)
Click to expand...
It shouldn't be a big deal, it's just a minor pain since we made a hot branch off of 2.1.6.1a instead of the mainline code to avoid risk from introducing other under-tested changes in an emergency update. I actually had Lordus make the fix and I have to see if he put it as a real branch in git, but if he didn't it's not really a big deal, I just have to check out the tag for 2.1.6.1a and make the change manually (it's just one line and very minor). I'll try to do that tonight.
 
Great to see Pandora users also help our community!

I'm HtheB (moderator at the maemo boards: http://talk.maemo.org) and came to thank you users ! :)

I'm pretty sure we could help to combine things to the pandora community (since the hardware is almost the same as the N900, hell... even the OS is both running on Linux)

Thanks!
 
HtheB said:
Great to see Pandora users also help our community!

I'm HtheB (moderator at the maemo boards: http://talk.maemo.org) and came to thank you users ! :)

I'm pretty sure we could help to combine things to the pandora community (since the hardware is almost the same as the N900, hell... even the OS is both running on Linux)

Thanks!
Click to expand...
Sounds like a great idea, why not make a thread in general talk with this idea and look for suggestions as to how this could be done.
 
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Exophase said:
Really, thanks, but it's fine. There are a ton of things I could be doing to increase revenue that are pretty straightforward, but I've turned it down because right now I'm really not that concerned and want to focus on fixing stuff/adding features without dealing with a ton of support, especially if that support extends to a larger and larger percentage of people who don't speak English (like if we added more translations)


The e-mails have died down a lot but at first they were pretty bad, like 100+ a day for the first few weeks. But now they're up again because of people hit with this stupid October bug :( The thought of dealing with something like that on a scale several times larger is scary.
Click to expand...
From my experience, one thing that Really helps to reduce the amount of support emails, is writing a easy to use FAQ (+ maybe a Wiki with user content) and point to that inside your app, and app description in the store.


I am sure you receive lots of dumb or duplicate questions that are really annoying to answer but you need to answer,


You know, to get a good karma and let these users know you care about them. this is good to make them spread the word of mouth and say good things about you.


But if you dont do something to aliviate this, support will make you crazy and prevent you to generate more revenue :(
 
Exo, you really have a chance to become a millionaire.

The fastest way to this today, is to sell something that is available in many areas, many people want to have and is affordable,

because it is good and the amount of money for it is relatively low.

The really rich families I got to know were producers of paper, pens, toilet paper, gypsum and other stuff that everybody needed,

but does someone here remember the original 1 Million Dollar Homepage, were someone just made a site with a big blank area were people/companies

could buy a pixel for a dollar? It worked. The site became popular and all the pixels were sold afaik.

If you would get a dollar from every Android user... oh man.

You could just write a nice FAQ and ignore all the support questions,

that do not come from your personal beta testers.
 
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RodrigoCard said:
From my experience, one thing that Really helps to reduce the amount of support emails, is writing a easy to use FAQ (+ maybe a Wiki with user content) and point to that inside your app, and app description in the store.
Click to expand...
We have the FAQ and forum, they're linked in the app listing and in the readme in the app. I shudder to think what our support load would be like without it. It's really only like 1-3% of the total users who have a problem that results in an e-mail. If I get a question a lot I put it there, but thanks to all of the variation possible on Android (many different hardware configurations, OS configurations, custom ROMs, software load running in the background, problems with external things like controllers and headsets, extras like Google Drive accounts) it's inevitable that it'll be an unholy mess that results in a lot of problems. You can look at pretty much any app sold and you will always see 1 stars from people saying they can't get it working.

It's even worse for an emulator because it doesn't Just Work out of the box, you need games. And people will ask for ROMs no matter how much you put it in bold all over the place that you can't help them. And they'll get broken ROMs. They'll get ROMs that are modified in unknown ways. And there's a million ways to use the emulator - thousands of games that we can't possibly always be testing and will never get fully working. And even worse, tens of thousands of cheats that do all kinds of awful things to the game code making a nearly infinite number of test paths (and there's no real guarantee that the cheat ever really worked properly to begin with because you know the people who wrote them couldn't play through the game with all possible permutations of cheats). And believe you me, people take their stupid cheats seriously.

Then you get people who complain because they don't know how to play the game. You wouldn't believe the number of people who blame the emulator because start doesn't open the menu in Pokemon. And that's the thing, there are always going to be some people who send angry e-mails first instead of trying things out or looking for some kind of answer. A sensible person would, when finding a button doesn't do what they thought it should, stop and try other buttons. Not close the game and give the emulator a one star rating with an incoherent review. But you can't expect all people to be sensible. Most of the e-mails are actually fairly reasonable and polite, but we do get some petulant types. And we get people who are using the cracked version and don't understand that it intentionally induces bugs - you'd think people would generally not bother developers if they didn't pay for the app, just out of some sense of pride at least. A simple "Did you get this from the Play store?" usually results in never hearing from them again.

And no matter what you put in the FAQ and the app listing people will still constantly ask about wifi support or 3DS support (or something even more absurd like if we'll add cheat codes to let you use Gen 6 Pokemon).

There's also trolls, like this guy e-mailing from "nintendodsjapan@yahoo.com" with the name "president Takashi" blasting their terms of service page at us (where they complain about emulators, among other things) in what I can only guess is a really lazy attempt to fake a cease & desist. There's the usual people who want us to pay them to review the app, translate it, promote it, or give us 5 star reviews (I'm not kidding, we're solicited by people who are asking for money in exchange for guaranteed 5-stars). And there's just the plain old untargeted spam.

Suffice it to say, a big e-mail load was always going to happen. I'm just glad it's gone down from the first few days. Early on it was several dozen refund requests and "where do I get the BIOS" a day. Then it was a lot of dealing with various Pokemon bugs. Adding the custom BIOS and improving Pokemon were definitely the most important things we did to make things more manageable, it's probably only around 10-20% what the e-mail load was. But the stupid October bug opened a fun new can of worms (some people just do NOT update the app until you tell them they have to). But we really do try to answer - I don't like going to sleep with more than a few recentish e-mails undealt with. I did get someone from the forums to help out too.

And when Pokemon X/Y come out I expect to be flooded again.
 
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mmm... so many complaints... and you... "Gotta catch them all !!"  :lol:

Ok, ok, this meme is abused by now... but it's fucking right in this case !! :lol:  It's like the Pokemon Curse is falling over you !!
 
Klumpen said:
Exo, you really have a chance to become a millionaire.

The fastest way to this today, is to sell something that is available in many areas, many people want to have and is affordable,

because it is good and the amount of money for it is relatively low.

The really rich families I got to know were producers of paper, pens, toilet paper, gypsum and other stuff that everybody needed,

but does someone here remember the original 1 Million Dollar Homepage, were someone just made a site with a big blank area were people/companies

could buy a pixel for a dollar? It worked. The site became popular and all the pixels were sold afaik.

If you would get a dollar from every Android user... oh man.

You could just write a nice FAQ and ignore all the support questions,

that do not come from your personal beta testers.
Click to expand...
And one day, Exo just buys the Open Pandora Inc./GmbH... ^^ 
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Exophase said:
RodrigoCard said:
From my experience, one thing that Really helps to reduce the amount of support emails, is writing a easy to use FAQ (+ maybe a Wiki with user content) and point to that inside your app, and app description in the store.
Click to expand...
We have the FAQ and forum, they're linked in the app listing and in the readme in the app. I shudder to think what our support load would be like without it. It's really only like 1-3% of the total users who have a problem that results in an e-mail. If I get a question a lot I put it there, but thanks to all of the variation possible on Android (many different hardware configurations, OS configurations, custom ROMs, software load running in the background, problems with external things like controllers and headsets, extras like Google Drive accounts) it's inevitable that it'll be an unholy mess that results in a lot of problems. You can look at pretty much any app sold and you will always see 1 stars from people saying they can't get it working.


It's even worse for an emulator because it doesn't Just Work out of the box, you need games. And people will ask for ROMs no matter how much you put it in bold all over the place that you can't help them. And they'll get broken ROMs. They'll get ROMs that are modified in unknown ways. And there's a million ways to use the emulator - thousands of games that we can't possibly always be testing and will never get fully working. And even worse, tens of thousands of cheats that do all kinds of awful things to the game code making a nearly infinite number of test paths (and there's no real guarantee that the cheat ever really worked properly to begin with because you know the people who wrote them couldn't play through the game with all possible permutations of cheats). And believe you me, people take their stupid cheats seriously.


Then you get people who complain because they don't know how to play the game. You wouldn't believe the number of people who blame the emulator because start doesn't open the menu in Pokemon. And that's the thing, there are always going to be some people who send angry e-mails first instead of trying things out or looking for some kind of answer. A sensible person would, when finding a button doesn't do what they thought it should, stop and try other buttons. Not close the game and give the emulator a one star rating with an incoherent review. But you can't expect all people to be sensible. Most of the e-mails are actually fairly reasonable and polite, but we do get some petulant types. And we get people who are using the cracked version and don't understand that it intentionally induces bugs - you'd think people would generally not bother developers if they didn't pay for the app, just out of some sense of pride at least. A simple "Did you get this from the Play store?" usually results in never hearing from them again.


And no matter what you put in the FAQ and the app listing people will still constantly ask about wifi support or 3DS support (or something even more absurd like if we'll add cheat codes to let you use Gen 6 Pokemon).


There's also trolls, like this guy e-mailing from "nintendodsjapan@yahoo.com" with the name "president Takashi" blasting their terms of service page at us (where they complain about emulators, among other things) in what I can only guess is a really lazy attempt to fake a cease & desist. There's the usual people who want us to pay them to review the app, translate it, promote it, or give us 5 star reviews (I'm not kidding, we're solicited by people who are asking for money in exchange for guaranteed 5-stars). And there's just the plain old untargeted spam.


Suffice it to say, a big e-mail load was always going to happen. I'm just glad it's gone down from the first few days. Early on it was several dozen refund requests and "where do I get the BIOS" a day. Then it was a lot of dealing with various Pokemon bugs. Adding the custom BIOS and improving Pokemon were definitely the most important things we did to make things more manageable, it's probably only around 10-20% what the e-mail load was. But the stupid October bug opened a fun new can of worms (some people just do NOT update the app until you tell them they have to). But we really do try to answer - I don't like going to sleep with more than a few recentish e-mails undealt with. I did get someone from the forums to help out too.


And when Pokemon X/Y come out I expect to be flooded again.
Click to expand...
:eek:

The problem is deeper than I thought.


I will never complain again about working around Apple's APIs bugs or controller drivers bugs...


Maybe it worths to hire someone to help with support stuff and then start doing more marketing. So, you wont be overwhelmed with this boring shit while improving your revenue. :)
 
@ Exophase : Have you thought about employing someone to offer support for DraStic?

They could answer support emails / deal with refund requests / reply to reviews on the play store etc.

My guess is you'd rather spend your time dealing with updates / enjoying the fruits of your Labour than dealing with endless questions about how to get Pokemon working.
 
I'm paying people little bits for small amounts of help (up to $600, that's the limit before you have to report it to the government) but moving to really employing people is a problem, there's a ton of things you need to be before you can be an employer. It's not worth it for this sort of thing.
 
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PowerGod said:
User: "Hi Nintendo Company Ltd., I just tried an unofficial DS emulator with some pirated roms, just to be sure I like them, and I want to say ..."

Nintendo: "POLICE !! HE'S OVER THERE !!!"
Click to expand...
Ok, thanks for bs.

Now let's see who is the *real* troll here.

Just for your information: "rom" I mentioned is hard-copy of original one. Also, I asked for GBA because I have plenty of original GB, GBC & GBA cartridges. I have universal cartridge ("Lite something") for GBA, and GBA emu 4 android, but I want to play it at DraStic because it works very well even at cheap 7" Android tablet.

Your logic is: Police, please forbid Pandora because it is intended for playing pirated roms.

Satisfied?
 
@darkborn: o_O seems like you misinterpreted, actually it was intended to be a joke against the closure of mind of the nintendo. (They even forbid to use a different firmware for their consoles)

(just to be more clear it was nothing against you, or the pandora, was just a joke)
 
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@darkborn: Nintendo thinks/says, that all roms and emus are evil and their owners should be decapitated put in jail instantly.

We should be glad, that the big companys are not yet the owners of this worlds states and do not make the rules,

although they are trying it all the time, with connections to the governments sometimes quite succesful.
 
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Nintendo has successfully had the sales of flashcarts for the NDS banned in the UK, on the grounds that they enable users to play pirated ROMs.

Note "enable" - they also are the only way to run your own code (and that of free software - games, apps etc) so do have a legitimate use. Banning them is equivalent to banning audio cassette tapes due to how they enable the user to pirate music.

And if Nintendo are capable of getting a government to ban something it doesn't like, it's not too far fetched for them to pressure the current Govt into banning Drastic on the UK play store.

D.
 
ZXDunny said:
Nintendo has successfully had the sales of flashcarts for the NDS banned in the UK, on the grounds that they enable users to play pirated ROMs.


Note "enable" - they also are the only way to run your own code (and that of free software - games, apps etc) so do have a legitimate use. Banning them is equivalent to banning audio cassette tapes due to how they enable the user to pirate music.


And if Nintendo are capable of getting a government to ban something it doesn't like, it's not too far fetched for them to pressure the current Govt into banning Drastic on the UK play store.


D.
Click to expand...
Perhaps the music industry could ban ears, as they could be used to listen to unlicensed music.
 
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