ZodTTD: Home Of Homebrew

After a long hiatus, I’m back to work on lots of iPhone & iPod Touch updates and even some iPad releases. First up are updates to allow all my current emulators to run on the iPad. They aren’t too shabby in 2x scale mode and they run amazingly well! Changes needed to be made to make this happen though. I am retooling my virtual controller code to allow for unique button images and a preview option in the skin selection to reposition each button. I also will be adding WiiMote controller support to those where it’s missing.

The first update will be psx4iphone. The psx4all code has been massively updated to allow for PSP EBOOT formatted PSX games, CDDA music, and tons of compatibility fixes. It will run much faster too.
Next up will be gpSPhone, snes4iphone, and n64iphone. After that I will check with everyone to see what should be updated in which priority.

I’m also working heavily on my Cydia community source. I’ve teamed up with CodeThemed to bring your own custom made themes right to Cydia & RockApp via their amazing web application. Try it out and hope to see your work of art on the ZodTTD repo. I’ll be talking more about CodeThemed shortly.

Thanks!
ZodTTD

As you may know I ported the open source project OpenTTD, based on Transport Tycoon Deluxe by Chris Sawyer, to Apple’s iPhone & iPod Touch then to the iPad. Both versions were placed on App Store. Both of them we’re pulled by request of Rubidium of the OpenTTD team. The latest blow, the removal of OpenTTD for iPad hurt the most. It was very fun, and was doing very well – Top 20 of all iPad games! I even had a short $500/day ad campaign pre-paid to AdMob to help support it’s movement up the rankings, made right before it was pulled.

Why was it pulled though? Simple answer is “no good reason”. Both were released for free. OpenTTD is GPL licensed, and I have the entire source code for the project place in my public GitHub source repository which I linked to within the iTunes product page to comply. I also made sure to place the license in the splash screen of the game to comply. The product page has a contact link, but I was never contacted before the two pull requests. Instead I found out by Apple that Rubidium had made the request. Odd thing is I was in their IRC channel (internet chat) the entire time and was never spoken to there either.

When OpenTTD for iPad was pulled, I contacted Rubidium again. He expressed his concerns about a lack of license and source, as to which I pointed him to both. I was very surprised by the negativity I was receiving by the OpenTTD team. I was trying very hard to comply with their requests, and being as polite as possible. When I finally asked Rubidium whether he has any intent to let Apple know they should stop the pull request, even if it means I must do some odd unrequired tasks they requested, he wouldn’t reply.

All in all it’s been very much an uphill battle to place this open source project up on Apple’s App Store even though it’s free and in compliance. Let it be known they have no intention to bring OpenTTD officially to App Store, as they have expressed that to me when explaining they lost their Mac OS X developer. When I spoke up and explained that I can bring my iPhoneOS version of OpenTTD to Mac OS X with ease they expressed no interest.

I love OpenTTD. I love Apple products. I want to see OpenTTD on the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, and Mac OS X.

So what will it take? Simply having Rubidium write to Apple to let them know this issue has been resolved and I can continue to update and release OpenTTD on the App Store.

How can you help? Easy!

Send the OpenTTD Team a donation of any amount directly via my ChipIn campaign here: http://openttd.chipin.com/openttd-for-ipad-and-iphone

No matter what the amount, whether $1 or $100, by sending a donation via my campaign it will signal to them very quickly that we want OpenTTD by way of a note and your full donation to their PayPal.

Can’t donate? S’ok! Please sign the petition here: http://www.petitiononline.com/ttd4all/petition.html

I made the first donation of a large $100 to start things off. I hope the OpenTTD team sees just how much we want their support, and how far we’ll go to see this project maintain their openness to new platforms.

Thanks so much,

ZodTTD

Hello all,

I missed you! Yes, it really has been over four months since we last spoke. But I’m back and ready to go!

So what have I been doing these past few months? Truthfully I’ve been trying to get outside more and enjoy the world. I spent nearly two years straight programming all day and night. It really ruined my social life. I took the time to find balance in my life. I didn’t post here for so long in hopes things calmed down. People were posting very nasty things, and I just couldn’t handle it at the time.

No worries though, as I have been working hard, in spurts, on many projects for not only the iPhone & iPod Touch, but the iPad as well! I made sure to fund comex with an iPad so he could work on the iPad jailbreak. I also have been keeping close tabs on geohot’s work. The good news is, we’re just in a waiting state. The jailbreaks are prepped to go. So whether it’s 3.1.3 on the iPod Touch 3rd Gen, 3.2 on the iPad, or 4.0 on the iPhone…it’s prepped.

This all has me very excited to bring my emulators on to the iPad. As you can see, I have released some videos of the iPhone versions of snes4iphone and n64iphone running on the iPad during the iPad’s release. They are available on my blip.tv video host here: http://zodttd.blip.tv. The WiiMote is already supported and tested to work on the jailbroken iPad as well! I’m working on iPad specific emulators that take advantage of the extra resolution to allow for better full screen controls that don’t get in the way of the action. I have friends such as westbaer ready to work on a general frontend/launcher for all my emulators. This can allow for easy updating of the user interface. I also want to add per game configurations.

I also am working on a few iPad specific App Store titles. I released OpenTTD for iPad which was a huge success, making the top 20 iPad games! But OpenTTD’s team sent a pull request to Apple and it was taken down nearly instantly. I will be making a post to see if I can get some support in getting it back up. Stay tuned for that.

In non-Apple related news, I have released Card Drop Deluxe on Intel’s AppUp store for netbooks. I am working on psx4pandora on the OpenPandora handheld. I might get a Nokia N900 to help support the port of my psx4all project’s port to that device. But most impressive of all is the 1300+ signatures received for me to support Android developments of VLC and some higher end emulators. It can be seen and supported here (http://www.petitiononline.com/ZodAndro) I’m working on getting a new Nexus One (as my previous one is on loan to a friend) so I can start developing on it.

As for this site, I plan to keep things very simple here. I will blog, and maintain a wiki for my projects. I really want to keep things friendly without the need to moderate much. So please be kind to others.

So I welcome you back with open arms and I’m glad to be back.

Thanks,

ZodTTD

P.S. Be sure to use the contact form to reach me directly. If you didn’t receive a response to your previous contacts I may not have received them. Please resend.

Hi everyone! Just a quick note that I’m currently taking a much needed vacation and will be back into the full swing of things by December 7th. I have limited internet connectivity, but feel free to use the contact page to reach me.

Thanks so much!
ZodTTD

This has been a long time coming, but my schedule is just now starting to free up. I have updated psx4iphone to also support the 3.1.x series of firmwares. Included in psx4iphone v1.1.0 is a fix for a bug causing the non-scaled landscape screen to display properly.

Don’t expect too much difference in performance. This emulator will still require an iPhone 3gs or iPod Touch 3rd Gen to really shine. I will be working more on this emulator as I get more free time.

You can download psx4iphone from the ZodTTD Repo which is built-in to Cydia via the included community sources package. This means it is also available via RockApp, Icy, etc. Brief installation instructions are provided within the package info.

If you run into any issues with psx4iphone v1.1.0 feel free to ask for support via the comments. Just remember, don’t ask for ROMs/ISOs or where to get the BIOS.

Thanks,
ZodTTD

Many developers I speak to want their own heavily populated forum based in their community. I was no different. It’s really nice to have a following and to be able to tap into this group to get a sense of what is trending, where to take your apps next, and directly communicate with those who use your software daily. My core forum audience, maybe even you, skewed very young. By nature this requires constant moderation and tough decisions of how to handle all the crazy that goes on. But what really sucks is how hard it can be to get a forum to become inviting to new users when you’re membership is low. My reaction was to keep upgrading and changing the site. This ultimately confused users and with the growing anger on the forums it made it near impossible to get new members. It was time for them to go…

So I closed the forums. I’ll just blog, invite other friends to blog, and allow for the community to easily submit articles to the front page. But I was running on forum based software on my web-server. I needed to change from Simple Machines Forum (one of the many pieces of forum software I went through) to something specifically for the purpose of a community blog. WordPress is right up my alley.

Going to WordPress is a bit odd for me. I started my site with WordPress years back, and here I am going back to it. It’s come a long way though and I really enjoy it. It’s weakness is the need to bridge user accounts and posts to and from a (decent) forum software. Luckily with the forums out, this becomes less a concern.

What I bring to you today is as much information as you can take from me, my friends, and even you. Similar to what I originally had planned earlier, but without the hassle of using forum software to do a blog’s job.

Do you have some interesting homebrew news, Apple news, or something inbetween? Once registered, you can submit news to me straight from your dashboard for inclusion on the ZodTTD frontpage!

Enjoy your stay,

ZodTTD