Emulation What's the best place to create a bounty?

[lordelan]

In case you missed it or don't care: Analogue just announced openFPGA for their Analogue Pocket a few days ago. Anyone can create FPGA cores for things like SNES, Genesis and so on for the device or port over some MiSTer cores.
Now I want to create a bounty for a PICO-8 core since it's actually pretty hard to do (you know since PICO-8 is a fantasy console and FPGA replicates real hardware). However, it doesn't have to concern you what the bounty is for that much rather than where I could create it.
I thought bountysource would be the best option but found out you always need an existing GitHub issue in order to create a bounty "out of it".
I'm just looking for a page, where I can create a bounty, give an exact description of what would have to be done in order to claim the bounty, start with a few bucks and have the community (including me) add to that bounty from time to time to make it more appealing.
Any ideas?

 

[hippy dave]

I don't know about bounty sites other than that one.

A thought I have is would it be worth asking the Pico-8 dev if he would be interested in making an official core? Pico-8 is closed source, so apart from the small handful of official platforms supported, all unofficial versions are recreations based on copying the official behaviour. AFAIK the dev doesn't usually do FPGA design/coding, but maybe he'd be interested to try it. Maybe using bounty money to buy him a Pocket would be a good incentive. I know he did an official port for another geeky open handheld (not FPGA).

 

[lordelan]

I don't know about bounty sites other than that one.

A thought I have is would it be worth asking the Pico-8 dev if he would be interested in making an official core? Pico-8 is closed source, so apart from the small handful of official platforms supported, all unofficial versions are recreations based on copying the official behaviour. AFAIK the dev doesn't usually do FPGA design/coding, but maybe he'd be interested to try it. Maybe using bounty money to buy him a Pocket would be a good incentive. I know he did an official port for another geeky open handheld (not FPGA).

His [the official] version highly depends on a modern OS. Completely different skills would be needed for an FPGA core and I highly doubt he would "waste" his time for such a niche product.
Also I think you might confuse PICO-8 (the official emulator that costs money) with FAKE-08. The latter is an open source reimplementation basically just like "retro8" (which on the other hand exists as a Libretro core in RetroArch) but while retro8 has a rather bad compatibility and doesn't seem to make any further progress, FAKE-08 plays almost everything flawlessly (which is amazing if you think of it) and that dev (the one of FAKE-08, not lex from PICO-8) has indeed helped the community port his emulator to some emulation retro handhelds such as the Miyoo Mini (where I play it on the most currently) and basically any other handheld that's based on openElec.

That being said, again, an FPGA core is a completely different cup of tea. My biggest hope would be the dev of FAKE-08 but according to many statements he dropped here and there, his spare time is very limited and he rather spends it to increase compatibility of FAKE-08 with the PICO-8 catalogue in general which is reasonable.
However I would - of course - mention (and link to) the FAKE-08 repo on GitHub if I'm about to write the description for the bounty.

So still, if someone knows a good site for it, please let me know.

 

[hippy dave]

The officially supported handheld I was talking about is called the PocketChip, it's not ideal in various ways but it's the only one with a Pico-8 port by the author.

I know FPGA design is really different to high-level coding, just could be possible that he'd be interested to give it a go if the opportunity was presented. Maybe not if he's busy with other shit.

Hope you find a good solution anyway.

 

[lordelan]

PocketChip

Ah that thing. Completely forgot about it lol. You're right, Zep did indeed an official port for that. Wasn't that big of a deal for him though.

 

[FAST6191]

Don't know how I missed that. Will have to note it in the upcoming review there as that is a bit of a switch up.

As far as bounties you can try that site but it is mostly going to be nerds and businesses needing the services of nerds on the cheap for their niche needs. That said as the pico8 is mostly the domain of nerds looking at simplistic devices to write homebrew for or write emulators for that might be something worth considering. I don't know that I would place the gap between conceptual console like this and FPGA as all that great either, even more so when people have written emulators/interpreters/simulators for that and other conceptual hardware (some of the Y86 stuff* got a bit interesting but have not kept up there for a while or indeed since FPGAs of notable gate count went somewhat mainstream rather than being interesting devices you found inside consumer stuff people were chucking out and repurposed) various pieces of programmable hardware in the past. If it was still the days of mapping transistor patterns from CPU microscopy onto FPGAs then that might be a different matter but it is not that any more really.

*for those not familiar then while the X86 processor that powers your PC is the result of several decades of slow change, bolting on features and iterations maintaining backwards compatibility then some universities and assembly language teaching types cooked up the Y86 which is a kind of simplified X86 without the legacy cruft of said decades, backwards compatibility requirements and legacy demands.

More general crowdfunding options might work. Standalone could be a thing but without easy payment options (paypal have a bit of a history of messing with things here)

 

[AncientBoi]

Bounty Hunters?

 

[lordelan]

Bounty Hunters?

That's a pretty general term. Do you have a link?