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Interview with Gollum the BOYcott author
> 1) What inspired you to make BOYcott?
Well, I discovered the emulation scene two years
ago. I already knew
Amstrad or Amiga emus but I couldn't imagine
that emulators exist for videogame consoles. I
was amazed by Virtual
Gameboy and Massage, emulators for the two
consoles I own (a Gameboy and a Master System
Model I). Great speed
(they ran quite at full frame on my old 486 Dx2
66),
cool improvements compared to the original device
(savegames,
configurations and the like) and good sound !
I decided to start a general emulation site: Emu5ever,
dedicated to my
quite unknown french engineering school, which
will
cover all these amazing emulators from all over
the world...
Last year, two friends of me told me about their
programming project:
make an emulator.
I join their project and we decided to start with
a Gameboy emu since it
seemed to be easy to emulate (Z80, few colours,
low speed...). Actually, we were two coders and
another guy will do the
optimizations and BeOS port. I suggested a funny
name:
why not Boycott ?
Finally, since I was progressing faster and
better, I started to work
alone and Boycott became the Emu5ever leading
project.
My best inspiration was Virtual Gameboy since it
was written in C which
means that such an emu would be easily portable.
> 2) What was your Friends/Family/IDSA
comments about BOYcott?
My friends and guys of my school were happy to
play Gameboy on our
Dec-Alpha workstations (DEC OSF-1 port of Boycott).
I always have many ideas from people, advices or
simply they wanted to
know about my progresses.
My family has not yet realized what is exactly an
emulator so...
IDSA ? Er... I live in France, I released Boycott
on our web school.
I never receive or have any complaints from
Nintendo or mails from the
IDSA.
> 3) What was the hardest part in BOYcott to
make?
Debugging the Z80 core (for instance, I spent two
weeks for a silly
bug).
> 4) What is planned for future versions?
Many thing since frEk, an australian coder has
joined the project.
- Gameboy Link emulation
- IPX/SPX, TCP-IP, SERIAL support
- A great GUI
- Better sound support (it is the crappiest GB
sound I ever heard... ;-)
- Optimizations (until it runs at full frame on
my old 486 Dx2 66 but
without any assembly at all (despite some VGB
ports) !)
- Open Source Project ?
- Full SGB/CGB support
- and the like...
> 5) What does BOYcott emulates the best?
Er... There are too many improvements left to say
that it emulates
something at its best...
> 6) Any ideas about NEScott/SNEScott/GENcott?
I already started NEScott and MAScott but I need
more time to work on
them.
I work quite a lot on PCott, a PC emulator for
MsDos (but it is portable
too...), I think I will continue this project but
I will restart from scratch as I have many new
ideas...
> 7) What was the best/worse feedback you got
on BOYcott
Best feedback ?
- people who wanted to port Boycott to other
platforms (just try Boycott
Mac by Richard Bannister, it rocks !)
- mails with congratulations and/or admiration
for Boycott stuff
- people who want to write a GB emu and ask me
for many advices
Worse feedback ?
- people claims for a boycott version that
supports Pokemon Blue (and
they forgot to download the lastest release...)
- people who want to write a GB emu and are
beginners in C and in coding
in general so they ask silly questions
> 8) What do you fell about other Gameboy
emulators and their autors?
They were only a few Gameboy emulators at the
beginning.
VGB portable, quite compatible and rather fast
and with very good sound,
GB97 a faster assembly of VGB.
Then Boycott, my attempt to make another portable
and cool free emulator
since VGB Dos was discontinued.
The excellent No$Gmb, the fastest and best for
debugging features.
Crappy sound but better than mine... ;-)
And then suddenly a bunch of new GB emus, using
Windows, DirectX and
often in japanese...
The only thing I can tell is that even me, I
cannot choose between all
these GB emus !
All Gameboy emulators authors seem to be quite
friendly !
I often exchange words with some emulator authors
and general emulation
site mainteners.
Even the author of No$Gmb send me some docs !
> 9) Will BOYcott have a GUI?
Yes, I hope. frEk has started to work on it. I
hope to see it working
soon !
> 10) Give the BOYcott users some info about
yourself
I am 22.
I am french but I don't eat frog legs all days. ;-)
I like coding and especially emulation stuff !
I own two consoles : a Gameboy (Boycott) and a
Master System (Mascott
but with the success of Meka, forgive it).
It is my last student year, I may soon work or go
to the army (beuark
!).
I am currently working with a college computer-science
and electronic
laboratory as an internship.
You know what ? This internship deals with...
EMULATION !
> 11) why the name BOYcott?
Because I was looking for a funny game for a
Gameboy emu.
I was looking for a cool name.
A boycott is a real english name and it is quite
good for an emulator name.
Then I kept the cott for all the next cotteries...
Mascott is quite similar to the french word
mascotte
But there are also NEScott,PCott,MASCott,HPCott,Cott64,PSXCott...
> 12) How many time you spent on Boycott and/or
Emu5ever.
Last year :
- Emu5ever = 2-3 hours a day
- Boycott = 1-2 hour a day
- Emulation Scene = 4 hours a day (mail, news...)
- Studying = 6-8 hours a day
- Pcott = only one full weekend to get something
to work !!!
Coding :
- first Z80 core : two weeks
- gfx : one afternoon
- debugging : two months
- improvements : since dec 97
This year :
- Emu5ever = 1-2 hour a week
- Boycott = 1-2 hour a month (I count on frEk
help)
- Internship = 8-10 hours a day
- Emulation Scene = 2 hours a day (mail, news,
downloads...)
- Pcott = no time
I must have forgotten my girlfriend in this
planning... ;-)
> 13) What do you think of this interview?
Interesting, short, clear.
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