There is a large group of people quite upset over my handling of open source software.

I maintain my compliance with various OSS (Open Source Software) licensing agreements by posting my project’s source code to my zodttd account at GitHub. The only thing that can be discussed is the lack of timely updates to GitHub on a couple of projects out of many. I was also made aware recently that I may have to pull a Cydia Store product, and I am researching the best way to continue while letting people enjoy the product.

I am addressing concerns over the timely updates by going over my GitHub and making sure it all is up to date.

Note that in order to comply with licenses my OSS ports typically fall under (GPL v1/v2), I should only need to provide source upon request. I feel as though providing sources in a timely manner via GitHub is something I should do, even though it is not required by the license.

That’s the extent of this issue at hand. If you have further concerns you may address them here.

Things have been rough as of late. Please read this one through as it will also shine a little light on why products and updates have not been rolling out. I’ve been extremely busy getting things straight in the “real world”. Though Google’s takedown of my Market and Checkout account couldn’t have come at a worse time. As you may have seen, Yong Zhang (yongzh) of Android emulator fame, was also taken down from Market by Google in the same manner that I was.

First and foremost, our takedowns have nothing to do with any sort of open source licensing violation. Both Yong and I handle developer relations behind the scenes. We give cuts to original authors at times, and I have posted sources to my source repository. Though there is a lot of rhetoric surrounding this, it is not an issue.

Google has no developer relations and support. Instead of Google simply removing the application in question, psx4droid, they did that and followed up a week later suspending my entire Market and Checkout account, with no interaction on my part.

And what happens when you suspend a Market account with a case such as Yong’s with lots of customers? Well you get hellish levels of emails, tweets, etc. that I must respond to most of every day. What’s worse is these customers are pretty stranded by Google. We can’t verify that many customers by hand. There’s no way to honor these previous customers, effectively killing our products. We can’t even issue a refund to users who are furious.

Yong’s emulators built Market up and gave it purpose when there was little to care about on there. Google was well aware of Yong’s top selling apps. Why is Google killing off developers (not even apps but the developer accounts!) that helped them get to where they’re at now? I wonder if they were aware all along. Take high risk apps, make themselves look all nice and open, then once they approach AppStore reach, they pull the developers they used. World may never know.

Right now as it stands, there’s little to no chance of Yong or I getting back on Market without a fight. I appealed and lost with Google in a canned response manner. I can go to 3rd party storefronts, but they have such a small number of users compared to Market, it’s not really an option with the large amount of effort these apps take.

For Cydia fans out there, I apologize for my lack of updates. But with all that has been happening, it made updating so many products nearly impossible. Things have snowballed and I now have so much work to do on Cydia products that it too has become more work than it’s worth.

So I wonder where that leaves me. This has killed my spirits immensely and I think it’s time to change things up.

First up, for Apple users. I noticed that I had to run the latest greenp0ison RC6.1 on top of my previously installed greenp0ison untethered jailbreak in order to get gpSPhone working. It seems there was a fix in the most recent greenp0ison build(s). By fixing this issue, psx4all should work on 4.2.x as well. Since I currently only have a iPhone 4 on Verizon running it’s latest 4.2.6 iOS firmware, I am not absolutely sure which software of mine is compatible with 4.3.x. Can you confirm this with a reply? I’m especially interested if gpSPhone works on 4.3.x with the latest Greenp0ison, Sn0wbreeze, and PwnageTool.

Your feedback from this site, and also Twitter, has me focused on updating a few projects. I’d really appreciate how to go about updating these projects as there’s so much to do and little time to do it. So knowing what’s a priority is good.

I’m currently working these projects:

gpSPhone – This jailbroken iOS Gameboy Advance emulator is currently working on iOS 4.2.x. I need to verify if it works on 4.3.x. I plan on adding WiiMote (and possibly experimental “Pro”) support, and improving the compatibility rate. Any other tweaks needed or suggestions for this update?

n64iphone – I’m working on a patch to fix this emulator on iOS 4.2.x and hopefully 4.3.x. This will be a bugfix update until a larger one rolls around.

psx4droid – I plan on getting this memory mapping issue handled by merging “ram offset” code into Notaz’ ( from Ari64′s) work.  Once done this will allow devices such as the Xoom, Xperia Play, and Optimus 2x to run psx4droid. It will also speed up the settings panel as I had to do some crazy workarounds due to avoiding the use of some libraries affected by the memory mapping of 0×80000000.

psx4all – After psx4droid get’s the ram offset code done, I can begin work on bringing this to iOS, which shouldn’t take long at that point.

I also want to update gameboy4iphone, genesis4iphone, and snes4iphone – Any priority, preference, or suggestions for these?

Thanks,

ZodTTD

It’s been so long since we last spoke! I’ve been up to all sorts. There has been a lot going on in my personal life. Being so stressed out from constant work for the past two years on all things ZodTTD, I started to get back to that outside world. Lots of socializing time later, I am now back to work again. Ah shucks, who am I kidding when I call this work. It’s pretty friggin’ fun!

As you may have noticed, I have streamlined this website very much. The goal being a way I can quickly deliver news to you about what I’m working on. Twitter only extends so far at the moment. I really need a place I feel safe to express what’s going on in the world of ZodTTD. There was a time I dreaded posting, as comments flooded in so fast and sometimes so nasty that I couldn’t handle cleaning it up. I now have two solutions to this issue, I have a moderator available to lay down the law if needed… or I can disable commenting if it gets to be uncontrollable. I will keep this place nice and clean from now on.

As my birthday is on April 2nd of the year 1982, I am considering reopening this site and getting lots of good work done a present to myself. So what am I up to?

As of very recently I was working on a large update to psx4droid. This update is MUCH faster and adds the options for OpenGL ES support which can increase performance of devices with good GPUs. Issue is Google pulled this release upon Sony’s request. I am porting the changes back over to the iOS version and I think many Apple fans will be very happy with it!

gpSPhone, the Gameboy Advance emulator for iOS will be receiving a much needed update as well. In addition to PSX, this emulator will receive iControlPad (get yours now) support in it’s next update. And best yet, many previously broken ROMs such as Camelot titles will now work thanks to patches by Yongzh of Android fame.

Then I will focus on n64iphone, snes4iphone, gameboy4iphone, and genesis4iphone. Lots to do, and I doubt I’ll be able to rewrite the entire UI as I’d like to just yet.On top of all this I also have a nifty AppStore app coming out soon. It’ll make some Cydia fans happy to see it, as I took inspiration from the community in making it.

I really am grateful for those who stick by my side and inspire me to keep providing fun apps to play with. I’m still alive and kickin’ thanks to you! Feel free to message to me on Twitter @zodttd or contact me by email via this site’s Contact page.

Thanks,

ZodTTD