SEGA Lindbergh emulation
While working on Stern Spike emulation (mentioned in previous post), I got contacted about SEGA Lindbergh emulation again (which happens every couple of days since my work in 2012 - 2014).
However, this time I was offered money to get Lindbergh emulation working. That offer at least made me consider it. As I'll likely be unemployed ex-student very soon (I'll probably drop out of college) and my financial support has been cut off, I've at least taken a look at it again.
The fact that my existing open-source Lindbergh emulator repository has not been attracting any active developers for 4 years, also suggests to me that open-source for modern arcade games still doesn't work. Users seem to want it (often even with the goal to make money off of my work), but nobody is helping. While people are interested, most of them are not skilled enough in necessary fields to contribute.
So, as requested by the person who contacted me, I've now started porting 2 games from Lindbergh to modern desktop 32-bit Linux using a closed-source emulation project. At the time of writing, I'm almost 100 hours into this project. It's based on my existing open-source emulator and new research.
The actual negotations about the final pay still haven't finished yet, so the deal might still fall through.
Here's a snapshot of my progress (on OutRun 2 SP SDX):
Keep in mind that this is insanely complex work which very few people in the world can do (limited by skill and resources), so I'll probably try to make money of this product in some form.
The problem is that the current offer looks good at first sight, but it's still not great, especially considering that porting a game (even with source code) at a company, would probably have more than 10x that budget, a way bigger staff and a longer timeframe associated with it.
Basically if there's the slightest issue I get stuck on, my hourly rate drops far below minimum wage and the whole project gets uneconomical for everybody involved. And as it happens, I'm currently dealing with some severe issues which could take weeks to debug.
I also want to avoid the situation I had with my previous Lindbergh work. I had sold most of my rights back then, making me unable to release anything open-source.
While I did upload some of my 2012 - 2014 work, a lot of it remains private even to this day.
So for my current work, I'll make sure to negotiate an open-source release in the future. Also I'll release some of my documentation about the platform in the near future.
