[natethomas]

I figured it wouldn't work, but I thought I'd suggest it anyways.

One of your friends might lend you their old phone/tablet.

King Dude, I know you're trying to be helpful, but you're really not succeeding. Asking a person to do work for you, and then also asking him to use subpar software or go begging for you is a really great way to succeed in pissing him off. And that's about it. Because it comes off sounding like you don't value the work at all.

Better would be to say, "I'm willing to lend you my iPad," or "I'm willing to try to gather contributions from the community and buy you and iOS device." If you can't say something like that, then maybe fewer suggestions would be good.

[King Dude]

If it's anything like the official Android emulator, it's impossible to develop for it and expect it to work on a real device.

But then again, it takes ages to screw up your development tools like Google does, so I expect it to be at least a little better than that.

But yeah - no device - no real incentive to do it unfortunately - I'm not going to 'secondguess' if the emulator does the right thing or not or try to debug issues people are reporting on their real devices with only an emulator - it's just an exercise in futility.

I figured it wouldn't work, but I thought I'd suggest it anyways.

One of your friends might lend you their old phone/tablet.

I'd rather do a kickstarter instead if we're going to go down that route where I have to 'beg' people 'pretty please - let me port this to your device that I don't even own' - I might be very generous, but I'm not insane either - and if people can cough up the cash for a Mupen64 'port' that has already been 'ported' - to the amount of a thousand bucks, then a kickstarter for a Mac and an iPad with the promise of getting a multi-platform, multi-console emu/game framework for free on Cydia is not really a bad deal for either investor or developer alike. I don't know of anyone else who would 'reject' the possibility of being able to charge up to $3/$4 a buck per emu port - I see all these guys doing that up until this point, I despise that and I instead offer it all for free - just like was the case before these app stores became 'fashionable'.

I've already taken money out of my own pocket opting for a Google Play Developer account just so that I can offer the Android port to people free of charge, splashed out the money for two expensive console devkits (the guys who sold them to me who turned out to be scamartists BTW), and I'm sorry - but in no way am I going to take any more money out of my pocket just to satisfy people's urges to have everything for free - the hacker community is alive and well in me but I sure am not sacrificing my wallet in the process - my lifelihood comes first and second. So, sorry, I might not like the idea of monetary donations and the like, and have been steadfastly against it for well over two years now - even resorting to booting people out that wanted to turn it all into a money racket - but I'm not going to 'beg' people to lend me their hardware either.

I actually meant just casually asking for someone's old Apple device rather than begging for it, but whatever.

From here, I think think the best thing would to go find a 3rd party user to port it to iOS.

---

I figured it wouldn't work, but I thought I'd suggest it anyways.

One of your friends might lend you their old phone/tablet.

King Dude, I know you're trying to be helpful, but you're really not succeeding. Asking a person to do work for you, and then also asking him to use subpar software or go begging for you is a really great way to succeed in pissing him off. And that's about it. Because it comes off sounding like you don't value the work at all.

Better would be to say, "I'm willing to lend you my iPad," or "I'm willing to try to gather contributions from the community and buy you and iOS device." If you can't say something like that, then maybe fewer suggestions would be good.

Sorry about that. I actually don't have the money to squeeze out for an iOS device either, much less financially fit to hand a spare device over.
As for helping to gather contributions, I suppose it could work, but I don't entirely know how I should approach in doing that. Kickstarter was mentioned, but I'm not sure what kind of results to expect for that.

Honestly, I wish I knew enough to program some of this. But with everything going on right now I seldom have time for learning the necessary programming.

EDIT:
Also, I looked just now and realized how snotty my suggestion to ask for a friend's old iPod was. I didn't mean that, I just had only a brief few seconds to write that post and had to hurry.

[squarepusher]

To be clear.... I meant no offense. I was sincerely offering to give you a device at no cost to you... For you to keep... To help get you going. If it came across as anything else, my apologies.

No offense taken.

If you can actually provide one so that I don't have to lower myself to doing a kickstarter (which I really don't want to do unless it's absolutely necessary), then send me a PM and we'll see about how to get it to arrive here. I'm reasonable enough to want to pay for shipping costs at least.

[umOuch]

[XBMCHUB]

We'd be more than glad to provide you with the hardware you'll need so that you can continue your efforts towards increasing the functionality of XBMC. I just sent you a PM, get back at us.

[King Dude]

Building off of my P2P-enforced multiplayer, I believe looking into the programming language X10 as a possible way to do this effectively. However, I have absolutely no idea at the moment how it will effect XBMC, nor if it will work with iOS and Android.

If anyone at all is familiar with X10, please educate me if there's a way of using it without an adverse effect on XBMC.

----------------
Here's a link to the official X10 site if they'd like to check it out.

http://x10-lang.org/

[HenryFord]

I'm drooling right now. And probably for the rest of the month. This would be incredible, like... wow.

[DonJ]

[spyder]

That looks awesome, how dare you tease us with that
I'm in for updates on this, I had RCB working and then one day it no longer started the emulator. I couldn't figure out what had gone wrong and eventually gave up on it.

[Bstrdsmkr]

Pretty sure the multi player would have to be baked into the emulator itself. The old xport emulators had good multiplayer support and there was one for pretty much every system. They also had a cool cheat system.

I'd love to see that stuff ported into these versions, but I think that's more on the retro arch side than the Xbmc side

[Ned Scott]

Another thought, with XBMC for Android we can launch other Android apps (such as games) directly from XBMC. So any games library could work (in theory) be made to work with libretro+ROMs and Android games. And yes, thegamesdb.net looks like they've got us covered for scraping :)

[squarepusher]

Pretty sure the multi player would have to be baked into the emulator itself. The old xport emulators had good multiplayer support and there was one for pretty much every system. They also had a cool cheat system.

I'd love to see that stuff ported into these versions, but I think that's more on the retro arch side than the Xbmc side

Netplay doesn't have to be baked into the libretro core itself - it's a frontend feature.

RetroArch (the 'official' libretro frontend) supports netplay just fine. It uses a rollback scheme similar to GGPO. Netplay in RetroArch works by making use of the 'rewinding' feature that has been implemented in most libretro ports (ie. savestate serialization).

So it's possible at least for XBMC's libretro player to offer something similar to that. Netplay is limited to two players at the moment though.

Also - one of our porters - lifning - ported a really neat Game Boy emulator to libretro - tgb-dual - its unique selling point is that you can do splitscreen multiplayer (and more) as if it were a console instead of a handheld. That could be fun for Tetris multiplayer sessions.

[King Dude]

I'm not sure how I feel about the buttons being used to play the game being the same buttons on the regular video player. Wouldn't that feel and look kind of awkward?

One of my questions would be why can we not just modify the gui and create audio/gamepad/etc. plugins? Unless I'm missing something, and please point it out if I am, it would definitely look better with a gui specifically for gaming purposes.

[Ned Scott]

The OSD would only pop up if you wanted it to, just like how it does for video. It could even be turned off at the skin level. Like I mentioned before, the controls do actually work. Pause would pause, fast forward would speed the emulator up, and rewind will actually rewind gameplay, bringing you back to an earlier point in the game.

[davilla]

I'm not sure how I feel about the buttons being used to play the game being the same buttons on the regular video player. Wouldn't that feel and look kind of awkward?

One of my questions would be why can we not just modify the gui and create audio/gamepad/etc. plugins? Unless I'm missing something, and please point it out if I am, it would definitely look better with a gui specifically for gaming purposes.

I for one do not want to support games in XBMC program/address space. They should run in their own.