Lukas was our fourth presenter and talked about his experience with open source development, specifically for the FCEUX NES Emulator. His slides were perfect as reminders throughout the talk, and stand alone as perfect notes. As outlined in our “Notes on Notes” post, you’ll want to look at the presentation slides to compliment these shorthand notes provided below:
Overview
- Lukas Sabota – OSS enthusiast
- “Don’t reinvent, improve on existing”
- Contributing to Open Source projects sharpens skills
- FCEUX – FCE Utlra X – FamiCom Emulator Ultra X – original project
- became abandoned, but licensed under GNU PL
- a lot of initial forks, problematic instead of one version, 8 versions.
- should’ve switched to git
- FCEUX at sourceforge (using SVN)
- first contribution is intimidating
- now has been in for 3 years
- originally fixed gamepad control after grabbing code with SVN and submitting a patch
- designed a GUI for linux (originally command line only)
- SDL – 24 members, 6 active
- #fceu on freenode
- uses lua scripting
GUIs:
- can write directly for your OS
- or, GUI toolkit libraries
- GTK – prominent in Linux
- not platform dependent
- bindings for a variety of languages
- Glade – interface for GTK, way easier
- another option – Wx
- chose GTK for FCEUX because great win32 GUI already existed
You can download the full slides here!