I wanted to chime in on this thing, since I really appreciate the comments but do not want people shit-flinging at others they have no reason to fling shit at.
And this is entirely from me, not representative of Normmatt or anyone else.
There was never any desire to see bliss stop his firmware. This was not about "competition" with me.
Honestly, I still love my RPG and think gelu should be nominated for an award because he's made it his goal to fix all the screw-ups of the AK team. gelu, from the start, has been working on the RPG in a "backdoor" sense. He did a lot of 3-in-1 work, but really he focused tons on fixing the loaders, soft-reset, etc... basically the general garbage the AK team should have prioritized in the first place.
My issue with bliss was just general code-liftings (common among programmers; we're all guilty of it) and a very minor thing that highlighted it was the whole "more" arrows in the cheat window. I know this is a small feature, but unfortunately the algorithm of the cheat window was so weird at that point with all the mods to it from Norm, me, bliss, kzat, etc. that it just was nuts to figure out just WTF was needed to trigger a "more" arrow to display. So yes, even the most minor of things can take an hour or two or 3 to put in. This feature was immediately put into bliss' firmware without credit (and it was obviously just a copy and paste, as the arrow locations were relative to the newly-enlarged cheat window, which he failed to implement.. so the arrows were too far to the right).
Hey, that happens, we all copy and paste whatever. My problem was the fact I called him out on not citing me in his list of updates and it was never rectified... I PM'd and posted publicly. So I just was sick of working hours and having things lifted without mention (even shortcut deletion, etc.).
Again, we're all guilty of it.
bliss was not the main reason I got tired. I got tired of seeing every other card manufacturer releasing update after update of their closed-source software with better and better features while the AceKard team simply abandoned the RPG.
That was my fear upon the initial announcement of the RPG, and I believe I cited it in my review of it for Emuholic (or at least discussed with the site admin on numerous occasions). I believed initially that the time we were all spending programming would lead to AceKard just using it all in a combined firmware and thus they would be the ones using it and hosting the source tree, etc... I did not particularly enjoy the fact users were looking to me and others to keep features up-to-date and add basic things other cards had.
I still use my M3 Simply more than any other card, and if I still had my SC DSOne I would definitely be using that the most. It comes down to how I feel a product is being treated by the people who make it.
All I gathered from the RPG's treatment was that AceKard was interested in having us make features they would then just put into the AK2, which was the "true" card they wanted to make.
I am not trashing the AceKard team; they have been supportive and communicative and polite through everything. I just eventually got burned the hell out on putting everything in, not seeing it implemented officially (not that anyone ever promised to do so, just kinda was thinking that was the whole 'open-source' idea), and -- yes -- seeing bliss lift my work without source code postings then using the excuse "my SVN has a problem" for months.
If it was that bad, he should have set up a google code repository.
Hell, Norm and I I think have used a total of 5 different repositories during this whole development.
Also, I believe you *will* see at least 1 release of the AIO software. I don't think Norm or I ever wanted to not release it. There's far too many hours invested into it to just go "screw bliss and AK, so no one gets it!" That's just petty as hell.
The AK2 garbage was annoying with the fact they could never get their korean copy protection code running on our firmware. I think the rectification is simply AIO removes Korean font support.
Sorry for the rant and remember these are just my opinions and nothing in this is an official announcement or promise. I just don't want people flinging shit.