Important for Developers! U3 Conversion

[petercottle]

Hello everyone at Project 64,

I am speaking on behalf of U3 LLC which has expressed great interest in the project 64 emulator for our mobile USB platform. U3 produces "smart" USB thumb drives for the consumer market. The main advantage a U3 smart USB drive has over normal USB drives is that it has a built in launchpad interface where programs can be installed and run from the drive. More information can be found here

Developers come to us wishing to mobilize their applications for U3 smart drives. For an application to be run from our U3 drive, it must leave the host machine completely clean after an eject, including the hard drive and the registry.
Right now, we don't have many games for our u3 smart drives and most of them need to be purchased. See the game section of our store here.

U3 is very excited about mobilizing the project 64 emulator for our U3 platform. Imagine carrying a virtualized nintendo 64 and dozens of your games on a single USB drive... able to run from any computer! What we want to do is allow our customers to download the project 64 emulator in a mobile format from our download central store. The users would be responsible for finding their own roms of course (we're not going to distribute copyrighted ROMS), but we believe this would open up our device to the U3 market.

What I am basically here for is permission from the leading project 64 developers to distribute project 64 from the u3 store. It would be free of course (free as in beer). Also, I have one question
Does project 64 manage data through windows registry or any other cookies in the system? It seems project 64 runs entirely out of its current directory (which is GREAT for mobilizing), but I have to be sure to allow it to go up on our download central.

I have personally converted project 64 to run off of the U3 drive as a test, and it performs like a dream.

If you are still fuzzy about the U3 platform, see a demo of it here

Thanks for your time. I hope Project 64 can soon be a part of U3 Software Central!

Just a small note:
U3 does not usually mobilize the applications itself. For Project 64 we are making an exception for this is a community-run application, but U3 will not mobilize applications for the developer ;-D

 

[squall_leonhart]

Project64 stores all rom settings in a ini file

BUT

all the plugin options are stored in the registry.

BUT.
i severely doubt this happening.

also, Project64 is not a commercial project, we don't pay to use it.

we can donate money to become beta testers and have access to the beta build, but it is illegal to sell project64 commercially even if its with a U3 Drive as it is a program which emulates a COPYRIGHTED platform.

..im sure smiff will go into it deeper then i have when he sees this post...

 

[Doomulation]

Project64 stores a lot of settings in the registry, but I hear 1.7 will change this. However, many other plugins may still save settings in the registry.
squall_leonhart: They did not expect users to pay for project64 but for the DEVICE itself. So the emulator is FREE.

 

[Smiff]

this is not an official response from pj64 team, please wait. just some points:

1) v1.6 uses registry HKCU for most config data. v1.7 should be capable of running without modifying anything on system, but 1.7 won't be done for probably years. if your requirements are true, this is a showstopper. you could clear the settings at exit but reapplying config would get difficult. you could look at an open source emu like 1964, i don't know how much modification that would need.
2) how are users supposed to get games? i don't see how you can provide the user convenience you want (this being the point of your product surely) given the legal situation.
3) its good that you asked

 

[petercottle]

Thanks for the quick reply everyone!

Smiff, I'll go off of your post...

1) Fortunately, we have a tool called U3Action that we are releasing soon to our developer community. It makes mobilizing applications much easier because it can manage starting applications, stopping applications, and maintaing registry data. We should be able to specify our tool to delete the project-64-registry nodes once the device is ejected, so it's not a show stopper ;-D

2) What we will do is allow the user to download the emulator in our U3 format. Then we will make a folder on the drive... e.g.
K:\Documents\my n64 roms\
Then the user goes and downloads games to this directory. U3 distributes something that is free, and the user himself does the copyright violation if he chooses to go down that path.
We are also thinking of including some public domain n64 roms.

Are there any public domain n64 roms, and if so, which ones are the best?


3) No problem ;-D

Also, a clarification for Squall, the emulator will be free. U3 makes money off of people buying software from our download central, not buying the device. Obviously we will not make money off of project 64, but we hope it will expand the popularity of u3 devices.

 

[squall_leonhart]

hmmm.. i'll have to look into just how deep copyright and retail laws go...

 

[petercottle]

if you look at
http://www.emulator-zone.com
and browse to the roms section, they claim that those three roms under the nintendo 64 section are public domain. I would probably need a statement more official than that though if we wanted to distribute them.

The main purpose of this is so savy gamers can download roms and use them with their U3 device without having to wrap project 64 to the U3 format themselves. It makes it more convenient, aka opening it up to more people. The user shouldn't expect a full videogame library with the package of course...

 

[squall_leonhart]

maybe nintendo should sell the roms...

 

[Doomulation]

But they won't do that.
Public Domain roms are totally free, however, and therefore it should no violate any laws to distribute them.

 

[smcd]

if you look at
http://www.emulator-zone.com
and browse to the roms section, they claim that those three roms under the nintendo 64 section are public domain. I would probably need a statement more official than that though if we wanted to distribute them.

The main purpose of this is so savy gamers can download roms and use them with their U3 device without having to wrap project 64 to the U3 format themselves. It makes it more convenient, aka opening it up to more people. The user shouldn't expect a full videogame library with the package of course...

Might check http://www.pdroms.de/

 

[petercottle]

WOW! thanks for the helpful link sethmcdoogle, a much larger selection here

 

[Falcon4ever]

u3 reminds me a bit of portableapps http://portableapps.com/ ...

lookin' good touch (i luv the outlook sync!)

 

[petercottle]

yes, portable apps are what U3 is striving for ;-D

I did some testing, and it seems Project 64 makes two main registry nodes...

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\N64 Emulation]
and
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\JaboSoft]

I wrote a small application to delete these when the device is ejected from the machine, so the registry entries are no longer a problem.

I have another question for the developers though... where does Project 64 save its configuration settings? Someone mentioned a .ini file, but I never got a file name or directory.

What I basically want to do is make Project 64 look in certain directories for saved games or roms, but have these settings always as the default. That would eliminate the need for our users to browse for them every time...

 

[Smiff]

PJ64 doesnt even support PD ROMS very well. lots of issues when we went through them. sorry to be negative but i'm not sure it's the right emulator for this. you should probably talk to the 1964 or Mupen people, where you'll also have the source. just IMHO.

I'm not sure though.
Zilmar / Jabo should be along later to give you an answer.
we do not allow repackaging without permission so yeah you did need to ask.

 

[petercottle]

Thanks for the response Smiff.

After looking at the PD ROMs, they aren't exactly what we are going for. If anything, we would have the users download project 64 bare and hunt for roms themselves.

I'll check out these alternatives, but it seems that project 64 is the most popular n64 emulator out there (and probably the most stable). We want to reach the gamer audience, and having them recognize the project 64 name would be advantageous.

I can't seem to find this configuration file anywhere. I don't think it is created at runtime, and none of the registry entries specify any details about the directories to be used, so I'm stumped.

What is the Project 64 configuration file called/Where is it? Thanks,


-Peter

 

[squall_leonhart]

hmm i actually think only RiceVideo plugin uses a cfg file..

the other plugins are all stored in either the nrage reg key or the jabo reg key...

ok
Project64 stores under
hkey Currentuser > N64 Emulation

Nrage is
hkey Current user > nrage

and the jabo plugins are all under
hkey current user > jabosoft

 

[petercottle]

Project64 stores all rom settings in a ini file

Where is this .ini file? that is what I am referring to...

Thanks for the help with the registry by the way.

Is Smiff going to come back with an official response from the team?

 

[Doomulation]

Last I checked the beta, it was called Settings.ini. In the same directory as the emulator, of course.

 

[petercottle]

I am still on version 1.6, but I just found where Project 64 stores its directories. The tricky thing is that if its on the default setting, there is no registry entry. Only after changing the setting to something non-default does it create the registry entry.

Thanks for the help you guys... I am almost done mobilizing pj64

 

[petercottle]

Smiff,
I was just wondering when I should expect an official response from the project 64 team on allowing project 64 to be distributed by U3. This thread on the subject is slowing getting pushed to page two, and I didn't want U3 to be lost in obscurity ;-D
I'm sorry if I am being impatient, but all I need is the go-ahead from someone official and I can move this project forward.
If making a 20 dollar donation would help, please let us know.

-Peter Cottle