Future DraStic Android port: help needed


will it have native support for the Sixaxis & other bluetooth pads (can you use touchscreen & pad simultaneously)
It has support for bluetooth pads, and you can save button mappings for up to 3 different ones.

There is also a setting to hide any mapped buttons from the screen overlay controller, so you can set it up however you want and also use the touchscreen at the same time.
 
I think some of the .EMU emulators on Android, which are all great, have cost me around £5 each, which is probably about $8 eh.


Fine for me, I think some of these that are free or just a couple quid are an absolute steal - I'm not moaning of course :) but still surprised so cheap
 
It has support for bluetooth pads, and you can save button mappings for up to 3 different ones.

There is also a setting to hide any mapped buttons from the screen overlay controller, so you can set it up however you want and also use the touchscreen at the same time.
Sounds pretty much polished already :eek:

You could upload a video to make the internets drool
 
The emulator will feature higher internal resolution or just graphics filter?
Sorry, no resolution enhancements.. unlike some other emulators but like most DS emulators this one is fully software rendered. There are a bunch of reasons for this, but suffice it to say that you need all the power you can just to render at normal resolution. Might be something worth looking into down the road, if I can split the rendering into multiple threads (and if you really want to kill your battery ;p)

I don't have any filters, no idea if Lordus is interested in doing anything - the core just renders the normal screen and his Android code is blitting it in a separate thread, so that's probably where a scaler would be applied. Personally I don't like most of the usual filters, I think they make too much of the graphics look unnatural. And I have a feeling it'd look especially bad with 3D, but a lot of DS games aren't 3D so that wouldn't make it pointless.
 
It doesn't look bad on high resolution phone, you should really do a trailer or a teaser ^^
 
Okay, let me try to get a list of beta testers going at some point then I can ask if anyone wants to do a teaser video. I probably won't be able to do much with this until after the next Pandora version is released.

IMO it doesn't look bad in native resolution even on a high end phone, or at least it looks fine on my Nexus 4.
 
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Thank you for all your answers, if the emulator is really that good it's going to be a best seller app on the Google Playstore
 
I can test on an EVO 3d. My tablet is an acer a200, but uses a tegra chipset

Sent from my HTCEVOV4G using Tapatalk 2
 
...Just to add on to what I mentioned before:

I'm trust worthy and respect that people don't want their work leaked.

I can do websites too, I've done a few which I can chop/change so that would be no problem.

I have a few android devices;

Sony Xperia Play phone
Sony X10 mini pro phone
Aoson Wopad tablet
Nexus 7 tablet
Archos Gamepad tablet
JXD S7300 tablet

Also have a couple those HDMI Android sticks I use with remotes, MK808 and another Chinese made one.

...probably pick up my HTC One this week too


More than happy to help you out with testing and feedback, and as I said with a website.

Let me know if need me to ok

...I have the HTC One now too, delivered this morning

Forgot to mention that the starting price sounds fair - I'm sure we can back you up with the first few purchases and ratings too! :)
Definitely :)
 
I have been thinking about the price thing and since in this post you are more or less looking for opinions, here comes mine.

I think the price is too much. Maybe not for the amount of work involved and maybe not for the american market, but think about China, for example, you could have a big niche market there but not with a pricetag of 8 dollars. Instead your app is going to be massively pirated, that goes without saying.

Another thing you are going to face is the tidal wave of emulation noobs, with comments like: WHERE R DA ROOMS give my money back this app is xxxx. In my opinion the amount of these nasty comments is going to be directly proportional to the amount of dollars needed to buy the app. Maybe you can control and answer those in english (or pseudoenglish), but every buyer is welcomed in Google Play with comments in his own language.

If you take a look at the emulators that are doing big time in Android, you realize that most of them have a support forum where users are helped and the author takes care of the problems that appear. That is part of the price they charge, no doubt.

Maybe you could launch it at an special price, something near 1 dollar, and this way help building a community of happy users, letting them spread its virtues. When you have a good base of users, a well established support forum and a reputation you could raise the price.

I am sure you have taken a look at who and how is making money out of this Android thing, but i think you could try another approach to get the money you, no doubt about this, deserve.
 
I can make sure to have a support forum before the thing is launched. I probably wouldn't need to spend a huge amount of my own time on the forum, those things tend to run themselves (support-wise) after a while. But $1 is insane, even for an intro price (and it'll probably get more than average buys in the first few weeks). That's way cheaper than other serious emulators that are more than quick and dirty ports. Furthermore, I think people will have a negative reaction to a price that's suddenly substantially raised, since that's not how it usually works. I'm not actually that concerned though, almost no one posts in them. Look at the nds4droid forum, 1-5m downloads and just a handful of posts. Or fms, he has a simple google groups forum for all of his emulators dating back years, long before the Android versions (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fms.vgba) but there aren't really that many posts and these days it's mostly just him. Note this guy has literally sold his emulators for like 20 years.

I could be wrong on this, but my gut feeling is that there is such thing as too cheap here. If you charge much less than the expected price for what's a much higher performance emulator than what's on there people won't take it as seriously, possibly subconsciously they'll look for a catch. It's not the same as if you give it out for free, then people will know you have a different motivation for it (or commercial just makes no sense like with most open source projects that have a bunch of people working on it). The question is really $8 vs $6, maybe $5, because there's no way I'd go lower than that. I don't think people are going to be more likely to leave angry comments if it costs $8 instead of $5. I actually think that a higher price will encourage people to try harder to make the emulator work, which will usually be possible (so long as they try more than some games that happen to all be broken). The real risk is going to be if the emulator flat out doesn't work on at all on someone's device, at which point it's a problem that has to be addressed. Ultimately the best thing to do is going to be to provide refunds for the people who are really mad at it. All in all some angry 1-star votes are inevitable, some probably deserved, but I'm not that worried since it looks like maybe 1% of buyers tend to actually leave ratings for emulators.

I'd really love to be able to give people refunds within 48 hours or so, no questions asked at all, I'm just worried about the time investment of actually manually doing this. I think that would solve any problems of needing a demo and making sure it works, and people would be more confident to buy it if they knew this - and I don't think anyone is cheating me if they can only use it for a couple days. I may need to actually hire someone to do it this for me if it gets crazy. The bigger problem may be getting Google to actually honor the refunds.

I could also try to urge people to prepare as much as they can to evaluate it within the 15 minute official grace period but that'd be really hard for anyone who doesn't already know what they're doing :/ Apparently Google does have a 48 hour window for manual refund requests http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57562188-285/request-refunds-for-google-play-apps-after-grace-period-ends/
 
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Regarding the emu noobs thing...

If Exo is planning on having the website running for his emulator, I guess the support forum will be built within that.

Just have the main description within the Play Store clearly pointing people there, where a sticky can be clear about how to set it up, even have a note on the description advising that anyone not familiar with emulators go check the sticky thread _before_ they even click the install/buy button.

Something like;

----------------------------

DraStic Emulator

****************************************************************************

Please read the support forum BEFORE purchasing this app

****************************************************************************

Support forum:

www.website.com/forum/stickyThread

Thank you.

**************

General Info:

----------------

DraStic is the ultimate DS emu for your Android device.

Features blah blah blah blah...

something something something darkside...

Basic Controls:

-------------------

This does this

That does that

Disclaimer:

--------------

Of course, you should understand that piracy is not supported and you should own your own rom set etc...



Another thing which is not that uncommon is for the Play Store general app description to list devices which people have confirmed to prove successful or not... which I guess can stop some of the negative comments.

Also, again worth having on the official website, some YT videos embedded.

Sure I'm not the only one, but when considering buying an emulator app I always hop over to YT to take a look at someone actually using it, I know most apps include a little official video along with screenshots but I still check for others.
 
@ Exophase : I can understand where you are coming from on the price side of things, my gut feel is that $8 will not see you maximise your revenue. However, as you rightly say it's a lot better to lower your price than raise it at a future date. Also you can offer a generous launch sale and hopefully also see good revenue.

Out of curiosity, how do you view Drastic for Android in commercial terms? i.e. is it a hobby for you where any revenue gained is a bonus? A full time job (if revenue is good enough)? Or as I suspect somewhere in between? This side of things should of course be a major consideration when it comes to pricing.

On the Google play side of things, polite answers to even super noobish questions / insults come across really well, pointing those with problems to an active support forum also looks really good, so good call on getting that up and running.

As you rightly say it's piss poor that the Android market does not allow a vendor to set their own refund period, the 15 minutes limit is understandable as a default but to not allow devs to set their own limits is a huge oversight IMHO.

Great to hear you're taking such care over things like controller integration & customisation, the best Android App I've used for that sort of thing so far is Mame4Droid, could be worth a look at how they do it.
 
I have a HTC One for some time now and wouldn't mind paying 8$ to test DraStic on that.

I've been playing around with DraStic on my Pandora for quite some time now and I really love what you've managed to do.

8$ should be pretty much exactly 6€ so this is a nice price for this emulator, especially considering how much better it is now compared to the other DS-Emulators.

Just send me a message when you are ready to start this.
 
Haven't seen the app or interface yet, but the most common complaint I will forsee is trying to get the bios files in the right place. As long as special attention is given to that part of the app you should be free of a portion of the "doesn't work =crap" types of comments. Fpse does it poorly, it works but lacks a solid confirmation you have the right files in the right spot. Once I get a chance to look at it (beta or public) I'll be sure to focus on ease of use reccomendations. As I see that as the most probable area of failure and bad reviews.
 
I think I would be a pretty decent tester. I have been an active part of the nds4droid community, even fixing the pokemon compatabilty in release 18(?) and started DSdroid emulator up until nds4droid made it's comeback. I have a 600mhz htc phone and a 1000mhz samsung phone (overclocked to 1228mhz). I know my way around android, made a custom rom for both of my android devices. I would be more than happy to make a teaser video for you exophase. Email me (seannym@hotmail.com) if you're interested in me being a tester.
 
I've got a galaxy s3 I could test it on. As well as an I control pad if you're adding support for that. I'll have a shield next month as well for testing.
 
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