Lack of recent progress and current news

    People have been asking for an update, so I thought I'd let everyone know what's going on. The past month and a half has been very busy for me. I'm now in college and working full time. I work 7 days a week 12 hours a day for up to two months straight then I get a week or two off. I was unemployed most of last year, so now I have a lot less time on my hands for code. My job does afford me some downtime most of which goes toward school. I'm currently pursuing a Associates of Applied Science in Computer Programming. I'm also looking at getting several IT certifications along the way to help keep my options open when I can finally make a career change. I do still have a decent amount of left over time most of which has been spent working on the forums and dealing with staff issues. The main changes I had planned there are done. (I got a staff hierarchy set up in order to reduce issues there and integrated the compatibility list with the site.)


    On the code side of things I've done some minor code clean-ups and I'm currently working on a few regressions. Along the way I've learned to better debug crashes which is a good thing. I also made my first attempt at moving code to the ME. I tried to move the "JPEG_Task" to the ME but this didn't go so well. So far it gets about half way through the code for it and crashes. Crashes on the ME are hard to debug, but this will be good practice for the CPU move. I've also started a full port of 1964Video(Rice 6.3.0r35) from the 1964 SVN which should kill 90% of the graphical errors and a few crashes from within the graphics plug-in. It will also increase the overall compatibility of the emulator as well. This will all take a while. The JPEG_Task isn't planned to be move and I'm only doing this as it much simpler than the CPU_Task and a good case for learning. As I stated I'm working on the regressions I introduced in Rev 432, this should only take a few days. Then I'll be back to debugging my JPEG related code and porting Rice.


    On a side note, both school and work are going well. Salvy has been adding a few bits of code related to uCodes and the blender lately and one of our forum members (Yamagushi)  has implemented a new GUI on Rev 463. I still have further plans for the GUI but his changes are a good starting point for my plans.

A week away and forums down

I've been gone for about a week due to an elderly family member having heart surgery (It went great). I just got back today.

I noticed Dark-Alex took his forum down, but he has stated M33 isn't dead and I quote from the IRC "Forums closed down due to expenses. M33 is still alive and well. Don't believe or spread rumours! | forums.exophase.com"

Our situation isn't due to money but donations are still welcome, but it is due to a problem with our host. I have decided we are going to switch (Don't know about costs yet). I only have yet to decided to whom. I am looking at this now. I will likely purchase the new hosting myself and a friend wants me to set up a website for his business. (Which may offset the cost, but all new donations will go to hosting as well as the ad revenue. Anything beyond that will go to charity.)

Side Note about current code efforts: Soon myself, Strmnnrmn, Howard0su will all be working together on the ME move issue. Howard0su and Strmnnrmn have been busy with other things and will be available to help soon. Howard0su has given me his latest WIP code along with Strmnnrmn. Myself and Salvy are working on the memleak. I'm working on some of the crashes. Grazz is still mostly concentrating uCodes for compatibility. So, compatibility, speed, and crashes are all getting looked at.