On your front webpage, we can see :

Light years ahead of the competition

Most emulators are developed by part time hobby programmers or college students. RetroCopy is developed in a full time capacity by professional and highly experienced programmers.


I have a little question, what is the ultimate goal of this ? I guess we all need money to live, so does this mean that at the end of the day, we are debugging your emulator now, and then that you plan to make it available for a fee once most of the bugs and features are under control for the 1.0 ?

Good luck for your emulator, I hope this will move other lazy project programmers to move their aXX and wake them up to keep up with the features you are offering in Retrocopy.

I would personally love to see a real opponent to Mame, so many people are just bored of having 10000 games half ass emulated on 500 different systems. Would be nice to have something did right, now that we have the proper PC to handle cycle level emulation.

Thanks, and good luck !

Roberto

Hard to know what the future holds exactly. It would be cool if RC could make money (as then I could work on it indefinitely) but I don't really know how it would do such a thing at this stage. I don't like accepting donations, so it could only be through offering something that people are willing to pay for. When it comes to emulation not many people are willing to pay for much at all.

Like most people I do have to work to survive. I've currently spent a bit over 3 years working directly on RetroCopy for a financial gain of about negative $2000 or so (server bills among other things), if I counted lost wages it would be closer to $600,000-800,000.

After maybe one or two more versions I may stop working full time on it and do some other things, I seem to get job offers weekly with increasing luxuries tacked on and it's hard to pass on it when you've got a mrs breathing down your neck.

Basically I had a dream quite a while ago now to implement something in an emulator that hadn't be done to a level I thought was good enough, and the next few versions will be showcasing some of it. Up till now it's just been getting the emulator and interface up to a level that is competitive with others. Most of the grunt work is done now so it's a bit easier to move forward with the more exciting things I wanted to see.

Thanks a lot for your honesty and clarifications.

As I said, I seriously hope that RC will move everyone's ass among the emus devs, especially if you continue to bring things to new levels. Can't wait to see what is left in your magic hat !

Some new (and quality in this case) blood is always more than welcome.

Good luck !

I dont think I would ever pay money for an emulator as they are today. I probably would have donated to you if there was a button for it though, just because you are taking things in new directions and I like that. But who knows Ralph if you come up with something good and offer a nice easy way to pay for it Im sure I and others will be interested laying down some cash! I also cant wait to see whats in store, starting with this new 720 release.

Speaking more of the future of Retrocopy, do you plan to extend it more to arcade or console ?

That would be nice to have finally something even better than Neorage for the Neogeo (just one example), now that we have enough power in our machines.

Good luck !

Ad revenue generated from clicks by social users / multiplayer gamers is very lucrative.

Online charades:
http://www.websiteoutlook.com/www.isketch.net
Daily Ads Revenue $71.48

Brand new online arcade emulator:
http://www.websiteoutlook.com/www.supercade.net
Daily Ads Revenue $5.51 (this number will most likely increase)


Let's say for example that you had fully functional netplay in Retrocopy. And then let's say you had a webpage where users could see all currently hosted games. The user would click the game on the webpage, and Retrocopy would instantly loadup and connect both users to the game. So there'd be a lot of clicking going on within this webpage (gamers entering and leaving games all the time). And then what you could do is place a column on the right of the page, with an advertisment. People would be in the habit of clicking things upon this webpage constantly, so occassionally, you could get people clicking the ads. This is something that youtube does very successfully to generate income.

Cycle accurate emulation is nice and all, but multiplayer gaming and social activity is what is extremely popular. People don't want to play games on their own in a dark room anymore. People want to play with friends. We are living in the social age; facebook, myspace, mobile phones, anything to do with chatting and socialising is very popular and therefore very profitable. Let users have a profile page with age, sex, location, favourite games, favourite game company, favourite console, all the stuff that gets people chatting. Then integrate multiplayer gaming into the website and have ads.

The more you integrate all of this into a seamless webpage for ease of access (people feel less inclined to load up programs), the more popular it will be. Kaillera is practically dead now, thanks to the likes of supercade.net and GGPO.net. These services provide multiplayer gaming, but for arcade emulation only. The authors of these programs can't develop emulators, because they don't have the knowledge for that. They're just using the sourcecode from an emulator called "Finalburn" to host these services. The advantage you have, however, is that you have the knowledge to add as many gaming systems as you like, thereby providing a potentially huge array of multiplayer games.

Something like Unity 3d could even be used, to integrate Retrocopy completely into the user's web browser. (If you haven't heard, unity3d is currently the most popular 3d engine within a web browser):
http://marunchak.co.uk/unity/terrain/

I love the NeoGeo as I played it often in my teen years. The next system to be added depends upon the vote going on in the other thread there. I believe System 1/2 (arcade) is currently winning. I'll probably get around to NeoGeo one day though as it is a favourite.

Hey Athelstone, thanks for your post - it's always interesting hearing possible solutions to problems. If you or anyone else has any more feel free to post them.

As can be seen with some of the things I have been working on over the last few versions, the online connectivity is important and should only be getting bigger going forward. There is a reason this website is running on it's own dedicated server for instance, but I won't give too much away.

[quote=RetroRalph]

Hey Athelstone, thanks for your post - it's always interesting hearing possible solutions to problems. If you or anyone else has any more feel free to post them.

As can be seen with some of the things I have been working on over the last few versions, the online connectivity is important and should only be getting bigger going forward. There is a reason this website is running on it's own dedicated server for instance, but I won't give too much away. ;)[/quote]

[quote=sven86][quote=RetroRalph]

Hey Athelstone, thanks for your post - it's always interesting hearing possible solutions to problems. If you or anyone else has any more feel free to post them.

As can be seen with some of the things I have been working on over the last few versions, the online connectivity is important and should only be getting bigger going forward. There is a reason this website is running on it's own dedicated server for instance, but I won't give too much away. ;)[/quote][/quote]

I second that. If you do get to make you emulator a web based one with multiplayer capabilities, then you are a step ahead of most emulators. It will distinguish you from the rest of the emulators, since this part of emulation is a new field and not many have taken advantage of it. I see nothing but positives from this.

Maybe, you should try emulating Pac Man or Donkey Kong next.

Yeah there are a fair amount of games on that pacman type hardware so maybe. System16/Neogeo/CPS1 are looking a bit more interesting at the moment though.

Work on whatever you feel like working on, because whatever you do is going to be awesome.