DraStic

Also, I wanted to clear the air a little bit here about the whole DraStic situation. It’s true that in the past I’ve been critical of other DS emulators such as DSoid — but this was not because I wanted people to use my emulator (in truth, why do I care, I make $0 off nds4droid). The reason was because the developer was actively stealing code (DeSmuME) and profiting off of it. DraStic is another story, it’s written by a brilliant developer (Exophase) from scratch, and he has every right to do with his code as he pleases. Do I wish he open sourced it? Sure. In fact, this is just my guess, but imagine that at some point in the future he will (he just seems like that kind of guy). I don’t, and no one else should, view it as an us vs. them thing.

When I set out to write nds4droid, it because there wasn’t a viable open source DS emulator available for the Android platform. In reality, I don’t have the time (or, to be honest, the intimate knowledge of the DS internals) to write the emulator from scratch. But I do have an expertise from my job in porting native code to Android, as well as writing regular Android UI code. When I was growing up, I used tons of free emulators and benefited from other people’s free labor. So, since I was in a position to be able to pay back this good will, I did it. This is the reason I didn’t charge for it or put ads in — I’ve certainly used tons of free apps, so I just viewed this as my turn to give back.

In conclusion, I harbor no sort of ill will or view DraStic as a bad thing (the only thing Exophase ever did to enrage me was make the gpSP dynarec a nightmare to debug!). If it makes sense for you — use it. If it doesn’t, don’t. And quit the flaming