Hacker News Reader

Comment by arcatek | Hacker News Reader

If I may, I'd like to also link my site (http://start9.io) which does this and also work with GB/GBC, and persist your saves online (on top of quite a few other features). The only drawback is that we actually require users to upload their games, for legal reasons.

We're still in beta, and it will probably improve quite a lot in the upcoming months, but I use it myself on a daily basis.

For the record, the emulators are currently based on Emscripten versions of the libretro cores (rather than being a full-JS emulator implementation, like IodineGBA). I'm looking to add more consoles, and the SNES will probably be come soon.

Should you try it, I'd love to hear your feedbacks (my contact is on my HN profile) :)

View on HN

Very cool, I actually run an extremely similar service (https://pocketga.me/) for NES, SNES, game boy, GBA, and master system. I hacked up many of the emulators myself to support state saving. It was a fun project to work on but I found that most of my users were not interested in paying for the service due to their young age group, so I'm only able to basically break even off the ads

What age range/distribution are your users? I'd expect something centered around late twenties?

Almost entirely under 20

So I tried it out and it's a nice start. My suggestions would be:

1. Needs way more documentation. It's not clear how to do anything. Doesn't explain how to upload games, even what platforms are supported (I guess it's just gameboy), doesn't explain what the controls are anywhere, has a feature to use your smartphone as a controller but doesn't explain anywhere how to do it.

2. For Super Mario Land the volume didn't work.

So I would start by further documenting what you have. And I would add a way to customize the controls and support the gamepad api. Nice start though. I'd use a service like this that let me upload any arbitrary gameboy, nes, and supernes games and not just specific ones.

Thanks ! Yes, I have a great deal to do as far as documentation is concerned (however, there is some doc about the smartphone-as-a-controller feature[1]). My plan was to focus on this before implementing more features.

The sound isn't yet enabled, I have to resolve some issues with Chrome. Shouldn't be long tho (once the documentation is improved :)

[1] http://start9.io/howto/remote-control

Awesome, I've been wanting something like this for a while.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com