Let me make a final response. I promise to end with technical (more or less) stuff
WindowsKiller wrote:First of all, please don't take the following words as an offence.
Sorry, but I couldn't help myself. See below.
WindowsKiller wrote:Seems like you got your money from all the people and don't care about your product any longer. Really a shame.
Would be a shame if true, yes, but it provably isn't. That you don't see something doesn't mean it isn't there. Would I be reading and responding here if I lost interest?
WindowsKiller wrote:Bottom line: I can't recommend anyone wasting money on this "emulator".
Are you really surprised to people's reactions if you use words like
wasting and sarcastic quoting like
"emulator"? I have a pretty thick skin (probably from reading this and other forums for a few years) but it sure as hell felt offensive to me.
Anyway, let's get back to the technical stuff.
WindowsKiller wrote:... but seriously, how long does it take to add something like keyboard support? 5 minutes, 10 minutes maybe - unless your code is badly structured.
You hit the nail right on the head here; I have already explained that this particular bit of code has indeed become badly structured by too many adaptations to specification changes. It needs refactoring and I don't feel like investing feature time until that is done. And even then it certainly wouldn't take 10 minutes, a whole evening looks more like it, considering the number of configurations and test scenarios.
WindowsKiller wrote:Any company providing such non-existing support for a commercial product would have long ran out of clients...
This is exactly the point; I am not a company and CD-i Emulator most certainly isn't a commercial product (if either of these were the case, you'd have to pay much more, certainly not less: software companies routinely charge several times the purchase price of CD-i Emulator
per hour spent on a project).
CD-i Emulator being a hobby means that I have to
like what I'm doing with the project; therefore mundane (to me) tasks like keyboard support will tend to get postponed until they are the only thing holding up a shiny new release. And that needs one or more somewhat major features or bugfixes; several of them are in the works but none are even near being finished.
Of course, I also tend to somewhat underrate the importance of this particular feature: most games are much much nicer to play with either a joystick (which CD-i Emulator
does support, albeit somewhat clumsily) or the mouse (which it supports quite well, I think).
Open sourcing the emulator might fix part of the problem, but it certainly wouldn't help with the core emulation issues as
nobody that I've had contact with seems to have the required in-depth technical knowledge of the CD-i system or even the drive to get it. That would tend to limit the contributions to the outer fringes of the project and thereby put more constraints on the core work. Pardon me for being selfish, but I'm not going for that.