Pixelbox PostMortem

This is the end of PixelBox, or at least the end of development :)

Working on a project this big, as a solo dev is a ton of fun; if you are starting out with software development i would probably reccomend a frontend of some sort. You can learn so much!

PixelBox started as a Birthday gift for my older brother and ended as an opensource passion project, which i think is pretty cool.

Development ended because i managed to hit everything i wanted to hit :) with that i mean emulators, config files background rom/directory scanning Terminal color blabla…

It wont be abbandoned, but also i probably wont work as much on it, i simply want to work on other thinghs now.

But, if YOU want me to add some Emulators/consoles - feel free to ask me anywhere, I will do that as soon as i have time.

Listed you will find the tasks / Achievments PixelBox was meant to reach, what went right and what went wrong.

Achieved{

Emulators: nes snes gb gba n64 nds ps1 psp

Ui: Minimalistic Ui Rom scanning custom backgrounds support Simple ascii art Clean colorful hover mechanic fun/silly text to welcome the use (i.e In Roms We trust) Run Emulator without arguments

Under the hood stuff: 28mb ram footprint Modular code (easy to implement new things) Github Commented code Error Messages Pull from Config file }

Failed{

Emulators: core emulation instead of binaries

Ui: animations, drawn art quick navigation

Under the hood stuff: -Nothing really :) }

What this means for PixelBox going forward - Nothing honestly, development stopped because PixelBox is stable and has everything, unless my brain goes “i really want a dreamcast emulator” or your brain goes “i really want a blabla emulator” the project will probably stay still as is.

Working on PixelBox is hard because the Emulators Frontend is generally a small Nieche, Tech saavy people just use other frontends (i.e Retroarch) or standalone emulators, non Tech saavy people dont go for Emulation in the first place. This essentially means that motivation/morale stays low, getting feedback is hell and Tunnelvision goes brrrr

A possible project for someone who has more expreience with frontend dev could be something like a retro console frontend (i.e Emulationstation for the r36s)

Thanks for your time (thanks for reading :]) ROMS FORREST, ROMSS!!