B00B! Interview

With Emanuel (Tubooboo), author of ngine-snes9x for DC

Interviewed by dc_emumaniac

B00B! Dreamcast Research: Hi Emanuel (tubooboo) can you tell us about yourself, and about your family, school, job, etc?

Emanuel: Hi there, nice to see that people are still interested in what hapens at ngine.de although I did not do all this much on my stuff lately... ok , well I am not going to expose all my life, but i am 25 yrs old and work as a programmer since about 7 years. Computing-wise, I am doing programming since about 13 years now, starting out on a machine called the Amstrad CPC, moving on to the infamous Amiga where I learned Assembler. After that I became interested in console programming, and now personally own dev systems for SNES, GBC, NGPC, PSX , DC and all new now, the GB Advance.

B00B: What made you choose the projects you have worked on so far?

Emanuel: fun really, I love Donkey Kong Country to bits and was fascvinated about the fact that there now were sufficiently fast consoles to run it on. Apparently, I did not take into account we could not use the x86 assembly CPU kernel, thats why all SNES9x ports are slow.

[...] and old projects, yea, there was THC-Engine, a Amiga PC-Engine emu, anyone remember it? :) I also ran http://www.classicgaming.com/aec/

B00B: If you dont mind can you give us the fans a status report on each of your projects?

Emanuel: Snes9x --> sound getting there., but expect no release for a while.
Hugo --> this i will start to work on again regularly. Should be released in a few weeks, but no promises.

B00B: What problems have you had and how did you overcome then?

Emanuel: The biggest issue was getting the GNU debugger to work. I can’t really tell you how I did it, I cannot remember anymore, but it was tricky.

B00B: What is your favourite Dreamcast emulator and what system would you like to see emulated the most and why? What is your opinion of the Emulator Bleemcast from a technical point of view?

Emanuel: I really like the completeness of NesterDC. Bleemcast is a massive achievement technically, but then still a massive dissapointment from a bleem fans perspective. I personally like it, and will buy one for GT2 when I get the chance of grabbing it somewhere.

B00B: What is your opinion of the Dreamcast Scene and what would you do to improve it to make it more accessible to new fans?

Emanuel: The real "scene" was never all that easily accessible. It has always been very tiny, and then, as tools and devkits are pubspread, it gets crowded by both cool and "less" cool people. From my view, the l33t scene core could be more liberal, and the newbies could be more thoughtful and thankful. I personally don’t think of the usual dcemulation.com visitor as a "scener", but rather of someone who wants to play SNES games for free on his telly. No offense, there are also smart and helpful people on there, but the majority gives a shit about how it all works. Then again, this has always been this way.

B00B: What is your view on the other new super consoles and the possibilitys of hobbyist development on them ie gba etc?

Emanuel: GBA I actively do development on, but I have not announced anything yet ;-). Jeff Frohwein produced a wonderful coding cable, and I managed to get one.

B00B: May i say thank you for your time and good luck with your project on behalf of Boob Dreamcast Research and the rest of the emulation scene.

Emanuel: thanks