emudrama and interpersonal relationships: a retrospective

A public address of the Reicast/Flycast and FEX-Emu/hex-emu dramas

Preamble

This is a retrospective. Feel free to report inaccuracies to me, and i’ll fix them up. Que sera, sera, and i wish everyone involved all the best with their private lives and their public projects.

This is r7+ of the text. More rework is forthcoming.

Amending a timeline

April 1st, 2007 nullDC is released. 2008 is the Financial Crisis and I acquire emudev.org. 2010 the GFC is felt in Greece; I open source nullDC. 2013 I meet some random Swiss people in a coworking space. 2014, I am invited by said people to join them in Zurich. In 2015 Capital Controls are imposed in Greece and my family and loved ones suffer; meanwhile I am invited at NVIDIA. 2016-ish libretro drama starts. Autumn 2017 brought private traumas that echoed for years, fueling my impatience in public clashes. 2018/2019 the “so called” Reicast of libretro further drifts away with significant contributions from Flyinghead. 2019 May 30 something triggers me, and I completely lose it with libretro leadership, trying to force a change in name of their fork. Thankfully, the fork was renamed and peace was found. 2020 is covid and I return to Greece; I also found nilware.io and am invited to work on FEX-Emu. nilware.io was disbanded in 2023.

Reicast

Throughout the years i have made my intentions clear to more LIBERALLY license Reicast, not to close source it, and to explore some freemium model to finance the running costs of the project I have been covering since pre-nullDC times.

2021 Dec 22nd Reicast is EOL’d as I’ve had enough blame and abuse, been called names, and zero gratitude for open sourcing nullDC, which i had zero obligation to do. Reicast was just rebranded nullDC/e-arm code, and very little of the core emulation code has changed over the years.

Note, that neither dc4ever, nor nullDC and also not Reicast started as community efforts, and instead were started/led by me (dc4ever) with ZeZu throwing his support behind nullDC(/e), which was a joint project. Between me and ZeZu we have written the bulk of the core and supporting emulation code.

A personal apology to Flyinghead

Shots have been fired both ways, i’m sorry for saying hurtful things when angry. I was beside myself with the situation at hand, and you got caught in the libretro crossfire and spillover from my private affairs. My sincere apologies, and gratitude for building on top of Reicast’s legacy.

Aftermath

Flyinghead has succeeded where I didn’t, in consolidating support and adding features. They are a capable leader.

I have devcast where I do R&D work; eg for refsw and for the GTA ports to dreamcast, dca3.

FEX-Emu

There was a disagreement in fex-emu, with several technical and non-technical angles, which led to a falling out between me & ryan.

I was also not given the option to gracefully step down or defend myself; And I would have deferred to Ryan as they started the project.

While I do want to take ownership of my faults in this; Including possibly being aggressive and stepping on people’s toes - without intent -, I think it was obvious I was having a severe mental health crisis.

Having said that, I wish to give my heartfelt apologies to Ryan for making their life hard. I understand they wanted to protect the project and they took the best choice they thought was viable.

Closing remarks

Cheers for reading this far, ~ skmp