(Note: please do not submit this post to news aggregators like Reddit or Hacker News.)
Overall, the hiatus from March had been going well.
Unfortunately, Tokyo ended up entering a state of emergency, and I've found myself stuck indoors once again with little else to do. In light of this, I started work on finishing the PC Engine CD emulation support I had started in higan. I was able to wrap this up and get most games running very well by the end of April.
But even more unfortunately, the state of emergency was then extended until June. As a result of this, I need something to pass the time this month as well. I wanted something to really challenge myself, and I wanted to take on an unsafe project that I have a high chance of failing. We tend to grow as developers when we push ourselves beyond what we know we're capable of, so with that in mind, I've started on a Nintendo 64 emulator. I cannot implore you enough to not get your hopes up here. People have long held unreasonable expectations of my abilities, and this is far beyond anything I've worked on to date.
The design I've used in higan up until now was simply not going to be performant enough for a system as powerful as the Nintendo 64, and so I've had to perform rather drastic changes to the underlying structure of the project. And given that I don't know when nor if I'll be able to return to taking a break, it did not feel prudent to try and make these changes to the official higan project.
As such, I've forked higan to an experimental local copy, which I've renamed to ares. I do not yet know what ares is or will become. I do not know if I will release it at all, or if I do, if I will release the source code under the GPL or not. I don't know if we'll try to get the ares work backported into higan or not. It is very much my personal pet project meant to pass the time while I am stuck indoors. My underlying RSI and anxiety has not really improved (in fact, it's worsened as a result of the lockdown), and I still really need that break. But right now, I'm just taking things day by day.
As an aside, I'd like to clarify that I am still going by the pseudonym of Near now, and I've stopped using the old byuu accounts. All that remains of the old name is this domain, which proves a real challenge for me because removing it would break over 230,000 backlinks here. Even if I were able to find a suitable near.tld domain to register (there's nothing available), I would still have to keep this domain as a redirect, and host all of this content on the new domain.
I hate to speak too far into the future here, because my plans tend to change, but since March I have not really felt any desire to have a personal presence online anymore. I no longer have any personal social media accounts I'm using. And so most likely going forward, at least for the time being, I'm intending to only run a Twitter account to discuss emulator development progress.
As always, things are in flux. I didn't intend to take a step back from emulator development until the end of 2020 originally. This has been a hell of a year and frankly I'm just doing my best to get through it right now. Hopefully by the end of this year all the uncertainty will be resolved. Thanks for reading.
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