Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Windows Port

Alright. Some people are wondering about the future of the Windows port. With this recent port, gaining over 2800 downloads already, I've patched up much of the problems we've been having with the previous attempts, making it the best port so far. So, with the next release, I will be starting from scratch, making some of the modifications in the trunk (like removing some left over Win32 junk from the original code that's no longer necessary) and others in a new branch. Hopefully I can make this one good enough to make a merge - This requires clean code and stability. I hope to see Qt4 builds on Windows soon, I have a feeling windows users would like it more than GTK+2. Speaking of which, the next version will likely still run GTK+2. I'll try to make it a better experience.

So anyways, Let's make a run down of the needed improvements.
  • More plug in ports
  • Glide64 Wonder Plus (I have a port already but it's of extremely poor quality)
  • Improved code quality
  • Less #ifdefs
  • Less hacks
  • Split up platform dependent things (blight's rumble support)
  • More plug in compatibility
  • Keep the SDL compatibility (our SDL plugins require that the emu run SDL, which we do now)
  • Try to add more support for input plug ins (Currently most crash or fail to work)
  • Windows Specific Features
  • Graphics in Rom Browser Window? (Warning: May require hackish code!)
  • XInput support in Blight (for those who don't feel like hunting down good drivers for their Xbox360 controllers)
So that's about it. We need this by the final port, but I may be able to get Windows compatible code in the trunk sooner than it's completed. If you have any suggestions, feel free to let me know, I'll add it.

Also, the Mupen64Plus Build Environment needs some improvements. I will have libsamplerate included so you can use JttL's resampler feature (I don't know how well it works, when I added it, It was pretty much a broken hack, but I think someone fixed it)

3 comments:

slougi said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
slougi said...

I had the KDE4 interface almost working on windows. It builds fine (with some very minor cmake modifications), but doesn't currently link. I'll look into it sometime soon, possibly during the next weekend. We could then have mupen64plus distributed with the KDE Windows Installer: http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/KDE_on_Windows/Installation

MasterPhW said...

I'm really looking forward to the next Mupen64Plus windows release.
You did a great job on all the stuff, so thanks for that.