koitsu wrote:
2. We've had 20 years of emulators across a myriad of consoles/systems developed, many (most? half?) of which support save states. There have been, oh I don't know, probably hundreds of thousands of people involved in emulation at this point. Yet, despite that, it is a very rare feature. What does this tell you? (I am legitimately asking you this question.
)
To be fair, I was a Mac user in the past so I used Snes9X a lot and that feature increased my pleasure even more with the emulator so I still miss it till this day. Now, if I was a Windows user from the beginning then I would probably not have cared for this feature like the rest of you are. The point I'm trying to make is that most of you don't consider this feature important is because most of you probably didn't experienced that type of feature and even if you did and still don't want the feature, other users will still benefit from it and some users may even change their mind after experiencing it. These type of feature is simply not a "trend" in emulators. If more emulator developers applied that same feature when emulators started to become "a thing" in the past then a lot of people would probably be asking for this feature today.
koitsu wrote:
3. A user being silent is their choice. Just because they are silent it does not mean that they support this feature, or that they are against it. They effectively choose to have no voice, which is 100% legitimate.
Totally agree, is just a shame that I'm the only one asking for this feature. I didn't even planned to bring this up but being silent about it won't help the situation either so someone needs to speak up. Just like me there are probably others that wanted to start this up but they could just not be bothered to do it, well I finally did now after decades.
koitsu wrote:
Filters are a slightly different situation, but for what it's worth, I am part of what you might call the "anti-filter" crowd. That said, I do find things like blargg's NTSC filters useful when doing things like developing or testing how visual graphics might look on actual hardware (other than doing real-world tests). But I'm not a graphics artist, so this tends to rank extremely low on my list of interests. To graphics artists, it may rank very high, and I think that's legit.
That's understandable, you may not like filters that much and I totally understand that but there are users that do. For some users the more feature an emulator has the better, other likes the simplicity of an emulator.
koitsu wrote:
There are some "visually-focused" emulators -- for example,
nemulator -- that offer this type of aesthetic in their UIs. But you will find by and large this to be extremely uncommon. Mesen and Mesen-S, as two other examples, offer what is called "Game selection screen", which shows a kind of preview of a game you previously were playing, and you can flip between those ROMs/games clicking or moving left/right (you can currently disable this in Mesen (and I do, via Preferences -> Advanced -> Disable game selection screen) but cannot in Mesen-S). Some people like these features/styles, which is great, but some don't -- which is why I'm glad it's a configurable option. But on the flip side, I find
things like this abhorrent, and similarly about HD packs. But that's just my opinion, and mine is worth no more or less than someone else's.
Yeah, some emulators have eye-candy features which isn't a bad thing in my opinion. Yes, I noticed that Mesen and Mesen-S has something similar with the "Game selection screen" which unfortunately only works when you quit the emulator. While this may be useful to some people is not that useful to me, I rather have full control of that feature and open that "Game selection screen" via hotkeys to either save the game or load the games. The author of Mesen can implement that feature pretty easily, the feature is already there after all, he just needs to add a couple of lines of codes to reduce that picture and add more slots in it and allow that window to be opened via hotkeys like "Save Window" and "Load Window" or something and that will be pretty close to the Snes9X approach for Mac.
koitsu wrote:
The point I'm making: if users want this feature (save state screenshot previews), then those users should speak up (as you are!). Those users should also be aware that if they want this feature, and the emulator is open-source, it is most likely that they (the users) will have to write the code to do it, including extending the save state format for that emulator to support a screenshot of sorts (thus discussions with the emu author(s) will be necessary because backwards compatibility will need to be ensured). I encourage people wanting this feature to do exactly that. Just please be aware there is probably a reason why this feature is not commonplace, and as someone in these scenes since their inceptions, I can safely tell you that it's because most users don't find it useful/of value and most developers don't see the point in spending the time to write the code for it. (Respectfully, remember that you did ask for opinions on this subject, so...)
Yes, I'm finally speaking up and I hope that other's will do the same in the future. Is just that this feature is not a "trend" in emulators so most people won't find it useful but once they try it out they will probably change their minds. If I was a developer myself I would definitely be implementing this feature to other open source emulators but unfortunately I'm not a developer. I understand that most developers don't see the point in this feature but the same thing can be said for the other features like "HD Packs" or as you pointed out, the "3D" in NES games. You don't like that feature and find it unnecessary but other's love it because a developer finally took action to break that "trend" to do something different.
