Future DraStic Android port: help needed

[Exophase]

Congratulations on the release! I'll be grabbing this for my Nexus 7 (2013 model) soon. I took a look through some of the reviews. Gotta love the 1 stars... 

I need a refund

. 

Please refund my money I didn't know I had to acquire these files legally
I don't mind refunding people, updated the FAQ to say we'll do it within 48 hours no questions asked, but asking for a refund by giving it a 1 star is kind of a lame move Strange that they don't realize that they'll get it better if they e-mail.

 

[waldo]

exo can you do a hotfix rlease for pokemon diamond glitches and black 2.A screen stretching option for both screens would be awesome as well.I noticed another bug as well.When i turned the controller opacity to 0 there were some black lines in all screen so it needed to be above 1 so the screen would be clear

 

[Hồng Thất Công]

Congratulations on the release! I'll be grabbing this for my Nexus 7 (2013 model) soon. I took a look through some of the reviews. Gotta love the 1 stars... 

I need a refund

. 

Please refund my money I didn't know I had to acquire these files legally

I don't mind refunding people, updated the FAQ to say we'll do it within 48 hours no questions asked, but asking for a refund by giving it a 1 star is kind of a lame move Strange that they don't realize that they'll get it better if they e-mail.

This is Mudlord's mother giving you  1 star rating and give her son 5 stars  

 

[l3reak]

Great job on this. I'd love to give you money for it, but I really only want your emulator to use on the OUYA. Any plans on a port for that system? It's a T33 Tegra 3 (almost identically specced with the original Nexus 7, but slightly better) and people that have tried sideloading DraStic on OUYA have had success.

Well, let us know! If you need a tester I'd be glad to help you out.

 

[FaeMinx]

Excuse me Mr Judge Sir, but I would like to be excused my sentence... I wasn't aware that I had to abide by the law. ... what? I have to read the signs? I thought my rights as a free person meant that paying attention or taking responsibility was optional...

Sent from my GT-N5100 using Tapatalk 4 Beta

 

[EvilDragon]

Um... can't you even automatically get a refund within 15 minutes in the Play Store...?

 

[Exophase]

Great job on this. I'd love to give you money for it, but I really only want your emulator to use on the OUYA. Any plans on a port for that system? It's a T33 Tegra 3 (almost identically specced with the original Nexus 7, but slightly better) and people that have tried sideloading DraStic on OUYA have had success.

Well, let us know! If you need a tester I'd be glad to help you out.

We're thinking about it. The thing is, it needs to be free-to-play and we need to do something for the lack of a proper touchscreen, and those are roadblocks. But we're getting a decent number of requests so it's not an easy thing to ignore.

I'm guessing there should be different modes for touch emulation. Using the trackpad is usually NOT what you want. Maybe there could be a mouse mode (as well as the ability to use an external mouse..) that has a visible pointer on the screen.

Um... can't you even automatically get a refund within 15 minutes in the Play Store...?

Yes, but 15 minutes is admittedly a pretty damn short period of time.

 

[l3reak]

We're thinking about it. The thing is, it needs to be free-to-play

Yeah, that's a good point - F2P models are trickier than people think. You could just make it run in "no save mode" or something, but you need to occasionally remind people that they can buy the app.

I've heard good reports from people that use a "robotic haggler" system. For instance, Dub Wars has it set up so you can check the buy page and it'll say the game is $15... but if you cancel, and don't buy, it'll say "Wait, before you go! We're gonna offer you a one time-deal. Buy the game right now for $10. If you cancel, though, this deal's gone for good!" Something like that.

I'm guessing there should be different modes for touch emulation. Using the trackpad is usually NOT what you want. Maybe there could be a mouse mode (as well as the ability to use an external mouse..) that has a visible pointer on the screen.

 

Visible mouse pointer would work pretty well for a lot of games, and I think Android is capable of making that happen pretty simply. You're just not gonna be able to play, say, Elite Beat Agents very well. That's not the end of the world, though. There are a ton of great DS games that don't rely heavily on the touchpad, so DS emulation is still a great value. It's the same on phones, after all - not every game plays well without physical controls, so users just have to make good game choices.  In the end, a gamepad just isn't the best input device for all DS games.

But if that's the only problem, there's a solution - let people use other input devices. I know OUYA supports mice pretty well, so hopefully mouse support should be simple. If you wanted to do something really cool, though, you could let people use Android devices for input! Sorta like the Wii U. You Don't Know Jack for OUYA does this right now and it's really cool. The way it works is that users download an app onto their Android device, then connect it to the OUYA over bluetooth.

But that'd be a ton of work for such a small audience. Or... I guess instead of making a new app, you could build that functionality into the current DraStic port?

 

[WizardStan]

Touch walking without a touch screen device will make you want to murder.

More so than touchwalking might already be doing.

 

[Mr_Loon]

Great job on this. I'd love to give you money for it, but I really only want your emulator to use on the OUYA. Any plans on a port for that system?


...

We're thinking about it. The thing is, it needs to be free-to-play and we need to do something for the lack of a proper touchscreen, and those are roadblocks.


...

Seems to me a good start would be to build in Ouya functionality (mouse mode for touch screen) into the standard version of DraStic and let people side load it.

That way it would also be a good fit for modern Android stick PC's such as the MK802IV etc.

Guess if you wanted it in the Ouya store then you would need a free to play version with all the added complexity that brings, but it would not surprise me if you saw a good increase in general sales, if you offered a free, time limited demo (that perhaps did not allow saves) in the Play store.

Early days though.

Talking if early days, congratulations in making over 1000 sales on day one.

Did you have any projections / hopes / fears relating to day 1 sales?

Also, congratulations on the hugely positive reviews, maybe the army of noobs is yet to appear but It's a very pleasant surprise to see how few people appear to be struggling with the BIOS problem.

 

[alucart1984]

August 7 2013: DraStic is available now. You can get it here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dsemu.drastic&hl=en We don't need any more beta testers at this time. Thanks for the support everyone!


You can discuss the emulator more at our forum here: http://www.drastic-ds.com


As some of you know, Lordus and I are currently working on an Android port of DraStic. It's going along pretty well and it's getting to the point where we need to start seriously planning for a future release. Not to say a release is quite ready for testing (and the next Pandora version will definitely be released first) but I figured it'd be better to be asking too early than too late. For those interested, the plan is to charge $8, which might sound like a lot but I can explain my reasoning behind it if anyone cares.


We're looking for just a small number of people who can test and provide feedback at some later point. These are the qualifications in order of importance:


1) Must seem very trustworthy to me. Sorry if this sounds really vague, and if I turn you down over this it's nothing personal - probably only a small percentage of people are going to be eligible.. And that's a big reason why I'm posting it here. So I guess people who have a long forum history and seem helpful and honest to me stand a good chance. I'm mainly looking to avoid anyone leaking the thing, which is something that has happened to other emulators.


2) Needs to be able to communicate regularly with us, preferably on IRC but I can do AIM/MSN/GTalk/etc


3) Should test lots of games thoroughly


4) Access to a variety of Android devices including less common ones is desirable. The emulator requires ARMv7a w/NEON so at least an Android device with that support is necessary (no Tegra 2 support, sorry).


Also, would help a lot to have a website going for this, so please let me know if anyone is interested in helping with that - I can probably give some payment for it (let me know what you think is reasonable too)

Thank you so much for developing such a feature rich product.  You will have my $8 tomorrow when my Nvidia Shield arrives.  Grant Johnson's videos also really helped me decide on the Shield and your emulator.  

EDIT:  Almost forgot to thank Lordus as well.  Thank you Lordus for developing the DraStic emulator as well!

 

[ChronoReverse]

I've been trying different games (and playing Advance Wars: Days of Ruin) with great success so far.  A couple standout thoughts:

(a) For Advance Wars, there are quite bit of (relatively minor) graphical glitches.  Besides corruption of the stage select icons, the highlighted area for moving units is the wrong color.  nds4droid's OGL 3D renderer has similar issues but its software renderer gets it right

( B) For the Ouedan (Elite Beat) games, even in low latency audio mode, there's a bit of lag with the audio and gameplay.  I wonder if a future option to add/minus a bit of lag between the audio and the rest of the emulation is possible

Nonetheless, just having fullspeed in everything makes this an actually useful emulator.

 

[Exophase]

EDIT: We found our person for testing Pokemon HG/SS. Thanks!

 

[waldo]

Since Pokemon HG/SS has problems we'd like some special testing help just for this game. What we need is someone who can help us find crashes, then if we improve things play through the game as much and as quickly as possible (so please apply only if you have a lot of free time to dedicate to this this weekend). Ideally a complete run of the game would be good. Pokemon lovers and experts are preferred. Am willing to pay a bounty for this over PayPal, $100 or best offer. PM me. If this message is edited away later then it has already been accepted.

what about pokemon diamond graphical glitches?Am i the only one here with that problem?And pls add a stretch option for both screens.

 

[Exophase]

what about pokemon diamond graphical glitches?Am i the only one here with that problem?And pls add a stretch option for both screens.

You mean the black cracks? Those will probably go away or be minimized with a tweak to the rendering engine.

 

[Hồng Thất Công]

what about pokemon diamond graphical glitches?Am i the only one here with that problem?And pls add a stretch option for both screens.

You mean the black cracks? Those will probably go away or be minimized with a tweak to the rendering engine.

Would this also fix Need for Speed Underground 2 where all the wheels are square meshes.  It's fun to drive REALLY FAST with square wheels though if this doesn't fix that 

Edit:  This happens in both Pandora and Shield.

 

[Exophase]

No that bug is unrelated, I haven't looked at that yet. Maybe something to do with texture caching.

 

[apersonthinks]

Found a bug with cheats. Cheats that are in the "root" of the cheat "folder" for each game wont show up. For most games only the Backlight Codes "folder" shows up with another "folder" below it called titled Assorted. Tapping Assorted will return to the menu screen and crash the emulator.

 

[Lordus]

Found a bug with cheats. Cheats that are in the "root" of the cheat "folder" for each game wont show up. For most games only the Backlight Codes "folder" shows up with another "folder" below it called titled Assorted. Tapping Assorted will return to the menu screen and crash the emulator.

The cheats in the root of a folder are supposed to be in the assorted folder, but there is a bug opening it, which should be fixed in the next update.

 

[waldo]

Hey lordus is it me or when i turn the controller opacity to 0 there are black borders in the screen?Oh and add a strech option for both screens it really bothers me when i constantly swap screens only  to read them