Is anyone here up-to-date on the current "state" of PowerPak mappers? The Wiki page on the subject is pretty good about referencing all the forks and variances, but assisting with a project recently that uses MMC3/mapper 4 caused me to have to deal with variance in behaviours and left (again) a bitter taste in my mouth. I'm just sort of ranting and will get to the point eventually -- but I don't even know where to start...
It doesn't seem like any of the individuals who have worked on these mappers collaborate, so we have literally 3 forks of the base/stock mapper sets, with each fork having fixes/tweaks/whatever (they're rarely well-documented) and behave differently, in addition to more one-offs from other users/developers. Some, like PowerMappers, implement whole new features (save states); others, like loopy's, are just a nebulous .zip file with no versioning so you have no way of knowing if you have the "latest version" or not.
End-users have absolutely no idea which of those mapper sets should be used, how they should be used (I've been extracting the stock set, then extracting loopy's on top of that + overwriting, then extracting PowerMappers on top of that + overwriting, then adding in whatever other mappers are found/discussed/whatever).
Furthermore, some sets (ex. loopy) are basically complete re-release of the stock set with miscellaneous files changed. Has anyone looked into the stock set .zip file? There's all sorts of (IMO) crap in there -- .txt files (some of these look very important, and are in binary (!!), others look just like readmes, others are empty but probably important?), .pdf files, a .jpg showing a resistor mod but without any text or pin descriptions or even if the console was a top-loader or front-loader, an .smc ROM (yes, for the SNES!), and even a .nes ROM. You can't even tell what goes where, you're just told "put all this in your POWERPAK directory on the CF". There's no way for anyone to know how to clean this up without knowing all about it.
I know nothing of VHDL, and very little of FPGAs or CPLD devices, so I really can't help here. I'm looking at it purely from the perspective of an end-user with a flash cartridge used for development/testing.
Is there some way to consolidate all of these? Is that even the right process? Furthermore, where is the source code for PowerMappers v23, and most of the other one-off mappers? Why isn't this stuff consolidated and stored in, say, GitHub with release builds made for everything, with everyone working together -- even if all just working off the master branch? Does anyone maintain their own "merge" of all of these somewhere, with proper versioning of releases, so users know what they've got? If not, why has none of this stuff been handed back to Bunnyboy for review/consolidation?
Like I said: this is kind of a rant, but the above really is the state of all of this. The EverDrive N8 isn't much different in this regard either, from what our Wiki page says.
Why does it matter? Well, when it comes to testing software like I am, it absolutely matters. For example, I definitely need to know if quirks/issues I'm seeing when testing a NES game with a particular mapper are due to a specific mapper pack -- and whose (and what version/release of that pack) -- so that I can report it back to the NES game developer so they can include in their readme/docs something like "PowerPak users should avoid blah blah pack v4.66 else the game will crash, please use v4.67 instead" etc..
It doesn't seem like any of the individuals who have worked on these mappers collaborate, so we have literally 3 forks of the base/stock mapper sets, with each fork having fixes/tweaks/whatever (they're rarely well-documented) and behave differently, in addition to more one-offs from other users/developers. Some, like PowerMappers, implement whole new features (save states); others, like loopy's, are just a nebulous .zip file with no versioning so you have no way of knowing if you have the "latest version" or not.
End-users have absolutely no idea which of those mapper sets should be used, how they should be used (I've been extracting the stock set, then extracting loopy's on top of that + overwriting, then extracting PowerMappers on top of that + overwriting, then adding in whatever other mappers are found/discussed/whatever).
Furthermore, some sets (ex. loopy) are basically complete re-release of the stock set with miscellaneous files changed. Has anyone looked into the stock set .zip file? There's all sorts of (IMO) crap in there -- .txt files (some of these look very important, and are in binary (!!), others look just like readmes, others are empty but probably important?), .pdf files, a .jpg showing a resistor mod but without any text or pin descriptions or even if the console was a top-loader or front-loader, an .smc ROM (yes, for the SNES!), and even a .nes ROM. You can't even tell what goes where, you're just told "put all this in your POWERPAK directory on the CF". There's no way for anyone to know how to clean this up without knowing all about it.
I know nothing of VHDL, and very little of FPGAs or CPLD devices, so I really can't help here. I'm looking at it purely from the perspective of an end-user with a flash cartridge used for development/testing.
Is there some way to consolidate all of these? Is that even the right process? Furthermore, where is the source code for PowerMappers v23, and most of the other one-off mappers? Why isn't this stuff consolidated and stored in, say, GitHub with release builds made for everything, with everyone working together -- even if all just working off the master branch? Does anyone maintain their own "merge" of all of these somewhere, with proper versioning of releases, so users know what they've got? If not, why has none of this stuff been handed back to Bunnyboy for review/consolidation?
Like I said: this is kind of a rant, but the above really is the state of all of this. The EverDrive N8 isn't much different in this regard either, from what our Wiki page says.
Why does it matter? Well, when it comes to testing software like I am, it absolutely matters. For example, I definitely need to know if quirks/issues I'm seeing when testing a NES game with a particular mapper are due to a specific mapper pack -- and whose (and what version/release of that pack) -- so that I can report it back to the NES game developer so they can include in their readme/docs something like "PowerPak users should avoid blah blah pack v4.66 else the game will crash, please use v4.67 instead" etc..