arcatek

Yup! Languages and frameworks: Angular (1.2.X) for the client-side code, Node with a custom framework for the server-side code, and C/C++ for the emulators (then compiled to asm.js).

The initial emulators were handmade in Javascript, but the asm.js-compiled ones ended up much faster in practice.

I'm sure there is! Sega announced last month that it would be releasing its catalogue online[1], and let's not forget the success of the SNES Mini, released last year. I was just on the market too soon, and especially without any connection to the people that could make the dream come true (hence why we applied to Y Combinator - more than the money, the network would have helped us). Oh well. :(

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/21/15846752/sega-forever-net...

There was three issues that prevented monetization:

- The userbase cannot grow enough without publisher, because the requirement of asking people to upload their rom is too much complex for most people.

- With no publisher by my side, I fear advertisers will not invest in a platform that is on the grey side of the legality (Start9 is legal, since we clearly state everywhere that only people uploading their own roms can use the service, but some might see this differently). Especially for the low amount of user (cf issue #1).

Everything comes down to publishers ...

The bitter part of this is that some people put together shitty implementations of this concept, but without any vision, any regard for the legality of the project, or even the future of the platform. They just make an html page with a flash emulator, add a bunch of porn and/or blackjack ads on the thing, and call it a day. They certainly bring more money than Start9, and they'll never get shut down by Nintendo ... go figure.

I was mainly looking for a business cofounder that could contact the older development studio owners to suggest them a deal so that we could start offering a kind of "All-Access" plan (à-la Google Music, Spotify, etc) to be able to play games without having to physically own them. Advertisement was also a track I was exploring, as you can see with the side menu that shows news from Polygon. I figured that with a big enough userbase, online magazines would be interested in being showcased in a proeminent place, while still adding value to our proposition (users of such a platform would probably be very interested by those articles).

I built http://start9.io three years ago - the idea was to somehow manage to show video game publishers that a 'professional' vintage gaming platform was something that could attract users. I wanted it to be the Netflix of the retrogaming.

Unfortunately, I never managed to find cofounders that were as much motivated as I was - each one I worked with was working on it as a hobby more than anything else, and I usually had to tell them what to do, which was exhausting considering I was the only developer to develop such a big beast. Adding marketing on top of that was just too much. We still applied to Y Combinator with the last cofounder I worked with, but he wasn't really ready to move to another continent for the project and quickly started looking for excuses to drop it. He got one when we ended up not being selected :) We're still friends, but I learned that it's hard finding people to build things.

I'm still extremely proud of this project, tho. Both technically and humanly, I learnt so many things! And the project is still running without needing much maintenance, so I guess it's still a success in some way. Plus, it helped me to find jobs, since people are usually a bit impressed when you can explain to them in interview how gameboys work under the hood ... :)

No, I didn't pass the Google hiring process. Things went much better with Facebook, tho :)

The two times I applied at Google after being recommended by friends already in charge went quite badly. The recrutor asked for my CV thrice the first time (rejecting my application between each request, until I stopped answering), and the second time I had to wait three weeks between the first coding interview and the actual results. Apparently, my hiring manager took some vacations, and her replacement had no idea about my file.

I applied only once at Facebook, and the whole process was a bliss. Constant flow of communication with my recruiter, very interesting interviews, and a relatively short time between the start of the process and the final result. It was really weird to see such a big difference between two big tech companies.

Doesn't the birthday paradox make it much more likely to eventually occur ?

Gen 17 had its last bird run forever

http://start9.io doesn't require Flash, but requires you to upload your roms. It currently support GB, GBC & GBA games.

He only use it in the "custom logo" section where he showcases his works. Since he's one of its designers, according to https://bower.io/docs/about/, I believe it's fine.

English not being my native language, reading your comment just made me realize the ":mrgreen:" pun (the smiley code that was shipped with standard phpBB installations).

And two days later, their phpmyadmin is still publicly available ...

There's more and more features every month. Add that to the various performance improvements (that can take a hit on the ram, dependending on how they're implemented), and it becomes a bit more understandable why you would see such an increase.

Not sure why you think it doesn't happen in other fields. Every time I spoke with a software developer, they were constantly cursing the architecture of the code they had to dealt with.

It might be a silly question, but have you checked if this module affects performances and, if so, by how much?

I kinda agree, but one has to concede that XHTML has failed for a reason.

People usually judge others based on what they can see ("you are what you eat", but not only). Why not based on what tool they use? It contributes to establish a persona.

A & B are mapped on respectively A/Q and W/Z/B, space and backspace are Select, and enter is Start.

I made an emulation platform called Start9 (http://start9.io), but it didn't got a lot of traction, my "cofounder" lost motivation, and I haven't yet found how to actually make money with it (I only have a handful of daily users).

That being said, I'm still extremely proud of it, at least from a technical standpoint, and will probably keep it running for a long time.

It's probably not so much a minifier than an obfuscator.

N different implementations can also mean that any single implementation vulnerability will only affect 1/N of the total user base. Using a single implementation isn't always the best way to achieve security (cf OpenSSL).

> jQuery.Deferred is now Promises/A+ compatible

Finally. Our old codebase is using quite a lot of jQuery deferreds and, well, Promises/A+ clearly improved a lot of things API-wise.

They purchased Sun in 2010, and sued Google right after.

It wouldn't work. Most browsers have a limit of about 2000 characters. Assuming a base64 encoding, it means you have about 1K of available data (since most saves have a power-of-2 size), far from being enough for any real game (especially if you want a save state, instead of an actual save - that would require to store the entire emulator state, which are at least a few megabytes tall).

> They justify the obvious copyright violation by only letting you play games they have physical copies of, and not letting more people play concurrently than they have cartridges. This... doesn't really avoid the copyright issues, but they do it anyway.

We found this service before creating Start9, and considered using the same thing. We talked to a lawyer before, who advised us not to do it, and fallbacked on letting people upload games that they are able to according to their local regulation (usually, games they dumped themselves), and forbidding them to lend their accounts to their friends.

It's 100% legal, but unfortunately it's still hard for some users to understand why this limitation exists. What I would love to do would be to have kind of a deal with game publishers, but as a single man currently working on the project, I don't the time to contact these studios (especially since most of them have closed since the games have been released, or are under Nintendo's copybag, which won't be ever available to third-parties such as ourselves).

Something that most emulators have failed to achieve (and that the Start9 project[1] aims to fix) is the user experience. It's great to have a working emulator, but it's even better to have an emulator that doesn't have a learning curve bigger than the everest. It won't work if we ask our users to download things from the internet (often from third-party websites), especially if they're shipped with adwares (as it happens with some official emulators), or require third-party plugins (remember EPSX?), or don't have any easy screen sharing features, or ... Things like what the article is about are a small step in the right direction.

[1] http://start9.io

I'm far from being an Ember-fan, but it's still going well too, even if it doesn't have as much hype as the two poster boys.

As for Angular, I feel like it's still too early to tell how it will end up - I loved Angular 1.X but eventually switched to React because it was much more convenient and only required minimal boilerplate. Angular 2 doesn't really make we want to switch back in its current state.

I'm using Atom on a daily basis, alongside with Emacs. It works quite well. There's some crashs due to Samba filesystems, but apart from that I haven't had blocking issues for a few months.

Maybe a single thing bothers me: the search and replace UI wasn't very good the last time I checked, especially when trying to replace inside a selection.

No, Magic has already been discussed before[1]. It seems they are moving from a percentage pricing (Magic) to a per-time pricing (Magic+).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9087819