This is not about being modern, it's about usability. The first thing most people do when getting a new emulator is change the settings to their liking... video, controllers, and so on. This step feels very clunky in your emulator, and this doesn't leave a very good first impression.Zepper wrote:3. User interface. It's old, and what's wrong with it? What's the problem of being that way? "Modern" people will never enjoy the oldies, like only playing PS4 instead of good Atari 2600 games, as example?
That's true, but it too is a bit clunky to use. It makes up for this by offering very configurable video and a great debugger, even though it's presented in a really weird way, with everything packed in a single screen with tabs for a few extra things. People still use it despite the awkward interface because it offers things that other emulators don't.Stella has no Windows interface, and it's still a great emulator!
The market for NES emulators is kinda saturated, so you really need to offer something other emulators don't if you want any attention, specially if you have flaws to make up for. We already have accuracy elsewhere, we already have great user interfaces elsewhere, we already have good debugging tools elsewhere. Why would we put up with flaws that bother us if we're not getting anything new?
A static disassembly is hardly useful. Can you at least step through the code and watch the CPU state change as the program runs? You're also neglecting a HUGE post of NES debugging, which is the PPU. When developing or analyzing existing games, we need to know what the name tables look like, what's mapped in the pattern tables, which sprites are used where, what palettes are being used. And, ideally, we want to *modify* all of those things in real time, and see the impact of those changes in the game.5. Debugger. Wait a second. In fact, you can't add breakpoints or view a memory region, but the emulator brings a disassembler and points to the current instruction once you open it. All the flags and CPU memory are exposed. So, what's up?
FCEUX does it really well with CPU debugging, but the PPU side could be much better if it included sprite debugging and allowed real-time modification through the interface.