Post by Arkhan on Oct 25, 2019 2:40:41 GMT
I agree that there could be better documentation, and I think collaboration could improve it.
I think that one needs to come to terms with the fundamental concepts that:
a) HuC is not a product. It has always been run by volunteers, and so contributions (such as in the direction of documentation) would always be helpful in a 'pay it forward' kind of way.
I think the caveat to this is that in some cases, you can find traces of statements like "We're working on that", which we naively wait on.
..or somewhere in the docs that came with HuC I believe, I know there is a statement that says something along the lines of "I didn't feel like documenting this."
I get that this is a hobby thing, but sometimes it has vague feels of trying to be run like a professional open source project.
It was, and is still the programmer's jobs to document stuff if they expect for it to be well adopted and used. In some cases, it was done well.
In other cases, not...really.
and then the rest of the bunch didn't really jump in and fix it. At times, it is a bystander problem.
What we have is not done as well as some of the other communities. This can be attributed to say, a C64 or MSX being a well documented machine already vs the reverse engineering of the PCE...
Or it can also be attributed to (sometimes admitted) laziness, assuming something doesn't need it (I did this with Squirrel for the C calls and need to fix it still), or just being too dense to realize you should probably document stuff because that's how that tends to work.
and before someone goes "well why don't you document it then"
and, well, I'm not a well versed hardware oriented engineer, so some of this stuff I am honestly expecting one of those people to document. I'd probably get something wrong.
Squirrel got a pretty OK document that apparently needs some extra stuff added. That's Aetherbyte's contribution. When a few other utilities I dicked with get launched into the wild, those will be documented too.
We don't work on HuC or hardware stuff in a capacity where we should be documenting those things.
It is crazy that I don't think the state of some of this documentation has changed in 15+ years, though. Maybe there is some stuff in HuC 3.9whatever that is different. I'm not using it so I won't comment.
either way, we collectively fucking blow at that compared to the other communities out there, lol.
Better documentation/tooling/entry point stuff would MAYBE (probably not) drag more people in. The amount of people doing anything at any given time has never really exceeded like, 5, though.
I don't know that we would really get a huge mess of people either way. The system was already the oddball system because everyone's got their dicks stuff in their Genesisesesses.
How do you pluralize the word Genesis. Genesi? Isn't that a shitty beer for poor people?