Guys, this thread is getting a tad too negative. Development of this port has not been ideal, yes, but the overall tone is probably not giving motivation to the devs either.
it is negative cause they seem to fix things while breaking others that worked very well. though thats not a thing thats new, as users, we've had complaints for over a year when we had weeks of broken releases and were still reverting to a year old version that mostly worked with issues, and we mostly understood that lacking the hardware to test this, there was little to be done about the 3ds version.
then they got the hacked hardware (i'm not sure but I believe it was gifted to them too) and things didn't really get better for another few months.
then the new stable (oh its more of a beta kinda deal) comes with additions that make sense on a ps3 or a high res high performance smartphone that really doesn't make sense on the 3ds version, like all of that empty space in the menues.
i get that the 3ds is only one of the platforms they support and with its limited hardware, requires additional work, or at least some consideration when implementing some things, but come on, they had years to fuss over smartphones and the other consoles.
i agree that keeping it identical over all instances doesn't really work and yes, there should be a fork for low power hardware like psp, 3ds and wii (if thats still in development).
Clearly they bit more than they could chew. These emulators should just be forked, so I go back to the question of the community taking it over. Hell, if this drags on long enough, I will take a GBC core to mantain or something.
for our all sake, take the gba core.
chances are the community isn't really capable of doing this on its own, things have changed since the wii days, developers and coders are rare and getting rarer.
and at least as far as emulation is concerned, the existence of retroarch seems to have pulled away interest from making emulators in general.
because why would someone waste time on writing or porting (or dare i say optimizing) their own thing when there's already retroarch.
I don't think it should be any of our responsibilities to rally people to the cause.
https://www.patreon.com/libretro
They're being paid a pretty good sum per month by generous backers for the explicit purpose of purchasing hardware and devoting more time to QA for all platforms. It says so right in their patreon.
"$550 – reached!
per month
Multiple times a week Quality Assurance checkins for
each RetroArch platform port, stability checkups!"
"$850 – reached!
per month
We can get our developers the occasional hardware equipment and tools they need in order to improve RetroArch and cores!"
If they aren't going to deliver on this, they shouldn't list those as incentives to donate.
granted 1000$ sounds like a lot but it really isn't. however, once money is involved, its understandable people start expecting more