STICKY: How can I help?

[jrra]

I have a lot of free time. What can I do to help out?

[yarLson]

Well that depends on your skill set.

[MarathonMan]

Well that depends on your skill set.

This, but allow me to elaborate a little bit:

I have no programming skills, can I still help?
Yes, of course. I'm currently a one-man team (along with a bunch of part-time contributors!) and this is a large-scale open source project. The number one weakness of most FOSS projects is an inherent lack of documentation, and CEN64 definitely fits that stereotype at the time of this writing. Anyone who is willing to document anything from code, to making user-friendly, non-technical FAQs, guides, or tutorials is more than welcome to do so. The publicity gained from such material could spawn interested developers, or create a large user base (which could also, in turn, spawn interested developers)...

Ehh... documentation is kind of boring. Anything else?
I've had several community members in the past work on "compatibility tests". Pointing out specific ROMs, both public domain and commercial, that have faults is very helpful; especially if the issues are easily reproducible or traceable. There have been instances where seemingly useless bugs have fixed several latent issues in the emulator. Have a save file or a certain set of steps that causes an issue? -- Post a thread in the compatibility discussion section. I can't promise that I'll get around to your issue in a timely manner, but there have been several instances of community members pointing out bugs that have been extremely traceable from a development standpoint and have improved the quality of the emulator.

I'm a developer, but I don't have any emulator (or cycle-accurate) skills...
No problem. The code's actually very well documented; somebody without familiarity should be able to gain background material fairly quickly and have no trouble jumping into things. For those who aren't interested in cycle-accuracy or developing the actual core of the emulator, there's plenty of things to be done, too. Want to make a .NET application with a complete ROM browser and graphical goodies for Windows users that spawns a CEN64 instance without users having to touch a CLI? A graphical or CLI (or both!) -oriented debugger with useful output? Awesome! I'd be more than willing to give me advice wherever possible on these kinds of projects.

I know a little (or a lot!) of C, and want to get my hands dirty!
The number one thing I can encouraged experienced developers to do at the time of this writing is to help track down bugs. That being said, features are nice and I'll rarely reject them (unless they don't fit well into the style of the project, or cause cross-platform issues, etc.)... but you should really help track down bugs and work on core issues . Either way, feel free to PM or contact me if you have any questions or are unsure of what, specifically, could be done. Pull requests or patches of any kind are graciously accepted.

At the end of the day: any help is good help, especially if it's cross-platform and open. Heck, even posting solutions or answers to people on the forums provides a helping hand! I'm really not going to refuse anything as it's like that if you didn't do it, somebody else would.

[Devin]

What kinds of FAQs, guides, or tutorials do you need?

[MarathonMan]

What kinds of FAQs, guides, or tutorials do you need?

Even something as simple as "how to use CEN64" would be nice. A lot of people throw their hands in the air when they see that you have to start it from the command prompt (though now Breadwinka has his tool for Windows... )

[Devin]

What kinds of FAQs, guides, or tutorials do you need?

Even something as simple as "how to use CEN64" would be nice. A lot of people throw their hands in the air when they see that you have to start it from the command prompt (though now Breadwinka has his tool for Windows... )

This good so far?
http://forums.cen64.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=10

[MarathonMan]

This good so far?

Yes, exactly -- stuff like that.