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Wraggster Interviews

Interview with: Metafox

Homepage:

Date: 2002

The Interview

 

Wraggster: Can you tell us where were you born, where you live, your family details,etc.?

Metafox: I was born on March 17, 1979 in the state of New York. I'm single, no children or anything - but I do have a cat and a guinea pig. ^_^

Wraggster: What qualifications do you have?

Metafox: I took a C course and a Pascal class in college, but I'm mostly self-taught. I know C, C++, Pascal, Fortran, BASIC, some X86 ASM, HTML :), some Java, and some CGI/Perl.

Wraggster: What made you get into computers?

Metafox: When I was in the third grade, my teacher had our class go to the computer room and make an ASCII Christmas tree in BASIC.

That's where I first got interested in computers, as well as programming. :)

Wraggster: What projects/coding have you done previous to your Laser Emulator.?

Metafox: I never released anything that I coded previous to Laser. I did make a few things, including an adventure game called The Adventures of Gus and Rob for Windows, which I'm remaking on the NeoGeo Pocket.

Wraggster: What made you choose to do a Laser emulator ?

Metafox: I always wanted to make an emulator. But I really didn't think that I had the technical skill to do it. I was browsing through the homepage of Mike Greene's EmuDX emulator, and saw the sourcecode for the first emulator he made, SinVader. The sourcecode was simple and very well commented. I emailed Mike and asked him if I could use his sourcecode as a basis for my emulator. Mike Greene agreed, and I happily set out on my way to modify the source.

Wraggster: How did you start and what programs did you use to start coding Laser?

Metafox: SinVader was completely written in C by Mike Greene - with Marat Fayzullin's Z80 emulator (also completely in C) as the CPU core. It was compiled in DOS using the freely available GCC compiler. The first change that I did was change the green graphics to white. :P

Laser is it's own emulator now, with very little of Mike's original code still in place. Especially with ss_teven's rewrite to a driver system. But Mike is still credited, because Laser never would have existed without him. ^_^

Wraggster: Can you give us a status update on your emulator?

Metafox: I'm taking a break from it to work on games for the NeoGeo Pocket and the Dreamcast. I also believe that ss_teven is currently not actively developing Laser either - so Laser is on hold for the moment.

Wraggster: How hard was it getting your Laser emulator to work and how can you improve it?

Metafox: Well, SinVader compiled for me on the first try, so it wasn't that hard at all. There are a lot of things that I'd like to improve for it. Lupin 3 is really messed up at the moment - it worked before the rewrite - but doesn't now. It's odd, and neither I nor ss_teven can figure it out currently. I'd also like to add some more discrete logic simulators to it. And Kaillera is a nice thing that I might look into too. :P

I'm also going to release the discrete logic simulators for the Dreamcast as a separate entity from LaserDC. (which was actually due to some pestering from wraggster :P) Pong Doubles on the Dreamcast using the 4 controllers of the Dreamcast could definately be a fun party game. :D

Wraggster: Do you have any new projects in the pipeline?

Metafox: 2 NeoGeo Pocket games (Pengo and The Adventures of Gus and Rob), 2 Dreamcast games, and the beforementioned simulator for the Dreamcast. I'm not going to go into the Dreamcast games any further - you'll just have to wait and see. ;)

Wraggster: Are you carrying on with the DCGen emulator and have any news about that?

Metafox:I'm still planning to do a bit with DCGen. I haven't really done much of anything to it since my source releases a while back. I've got a few ideas I'd like to work to try to improve some things in the emulator once I get back to actively working on it again.

Wraggster:What are the good and Bad side of Being a Emulation website webmaster?

Metafox:It's fun to be able to think up ideas and bring them into a website, and I like to post news - it is a nice break from coding and real life. :P

The bad side I guess, would be keeping staff, and keeping spirit up among staff members (and myself). It's hard to keep a site up to people's expectations when a site's been around for so long.

Wraggster: Whats your opinion of the Xbox and PS2 Emulation Scenes and which looks the most promising for you?

Metafox: I don't like the way that binary distribution is handled with the XBox. But, with Xbox's x86 processor - XBox definately looks the most promising. When Linux is running at a reasonable speed on the Xbox, you won't have to recompile every program to run like you do with the Dreamcast.

The PS2 emulation scene, though, is fun to watch. I like BigBoy's emulators, and his emulator framework is neat. I might decide to try something on the PS2 some time. :)

A big thanks to Metafox for a great Interview. :)

 

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