byuu.org has been my personal home on the web for the past fifteen years.
Throughout this time, the emulation projects I started in my youth have continued to grow and become more well known. Over time, more and more individuals have contributed to help make these emulators the successes they are today.
Both bsnes and higan have grown beyond my personal projects, and into true preservation of our gaming heritage. As such, they deserve a proper community-driven development process.
Last year, I opened up development of these emulators to GitHub. And this year, I have handed the reins over to a trusted team of developers who now maintain these emulation projects in my stead. Development is open to anyone who wishes to contribute.
You can find the bsnes GitHub project here, and the higan GitHub project here.
The problem is, up until now I have hosted these emulation projects myself on this website. And throughout the years, we've amassed hundreds of thousands of backlinks across the web here. But I cannot see a way to maintain byuu.org as both my personal website, and as home to these emulators.
I accept the responsibility for not separating bsnes and higan from byuu.org sooner, but it's better late than never. As such, I feel the best course of action is to retire this domain, yet due to the existing backlinks, leave it online for as long as I am able to do so.
To this aim, I have registered new domains for pointing at the bsnes and higan emulator projects: they are bsnes.dev and higan.dev. For the immediate future, they point at byuu.org, but once the emulators have their own standalone project sites, I will repoint the links at their new home instead.
What about my personal website?
To help break the association between byuu.org, myself, and bsnes + higan, I have opted to change my online pseudonym after 22 years to Near. If you're willing to help me with this effort, I would be grateful if you could please call me Near going forward.
The truth is, I work best alone and always have. I am still an emulator developer at heart and do wish to continue working on emulators in my own personal space. And so to that aim, I have begun development on a fork of higan, which I am calling ares. I have created a new website for this project as well: ares.dev.
ares is still in the early planning stages, but so far has gained PC Engine CD and Nintendo 64 emulation support. I have still not worked out how higan and ares will co-exist together, but I am sure the pieces will come together over time.
In the long-term, until and unless things improve in my life, I do not expect to be as active in developing ares as I have been in developing higan. However, I do appreciate having my own personal fork to work on whenever I am in the mood and have the time. So please feel free to check out ares.dev from time to time if you wish to follow my progress. You can also follow its progress via @ares_emu on Twitter if you prefer.
Thank you all again!
It's been absolutely wonderful and I couldn't have asked for more loyal and supportive fans and colleagues over the years. This isn't a dramatic goodbye: I will still around as always, but going forward, I'll mostly be sticking to just my personal emulator development online.
Thanks for reading; I wish you all the very best!
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