I am a developer how can I help?

[Comrade]

Hello!

Comrade here,

I have heard that there are only 3 or 4 developers working on the Android version of Dolphin, and I am here to provide some help if possible!

I have written games for Android in the past, but it has been a while.
I was thinking, if you need some more support, I could maybe work on some UI stuff/button mapping or just small stuff to start.

I am a really fast learner, but I could use a little mentorship to bring me up to speed on how to start to contribute to this. I have used git and github before, so I don't need much info there. Just if you guys have some new developer documentation that will help explain the basic flow of the game loop and get me up to speed that would be super helpful.

I am not even sure this is the right place to post this, but oh well.

I can probably get caught up on this the hard way rather quickly too by just digging into it on my own, but it would just be neater and quicker with some help.

Keep up the good work guys! This emulator is coming along nicely.
Comrade

[Helios]

Try one developer.

There used to be two but now one person no longer works on Dolphin. Somebody worked on the UI for awhile but then they stopped too.

Drop by #dolphin-dev on freenode. We could REALLY use somebody to finish fleshing out the missing features in the UI and nobody wants to deal with Java long enough to do it.

[brujo5]

as @Helios say the UI is unifished and need treatment. Thanks

[degasus]

Yeah, #dolphin-dev on freenode is the best place. Please ping me there

In my opinion, there is no need to ask where we need help. It's more important where you want to do some fancy stuff. We can just propose some projects which need some love, you should choose by your interrests.

- Android UI - https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/tree/master/Source/Android
This UI was written by a single guy, sigmabeta. His last project was to rewrite the input setting window. This was 4 months ago, so I'd call it orphaned. So right now, there is no way to config them but to use old builds... He isn't on IRC any more, but he is still quite responding on github, and also often here in the forum. Feel free to ask him to join on IRC again

- PowerPC emulation - https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/tree/master/Source/Core/Core/PowerPC/JitArm64
Everything but the UI is written in C++ as native app. As this still isn't fast enough for emulating a CPU, we use a custom just-in-time compiler to compile to aarch64. There also was an aarch32 one, but it was dropped because no one wanted to maintain a broken JIT with no fast hardware: https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/commits/master/Source/Core/Core/PowerPC/JitArm32
Both JITs were started by HdkR/Sonicadvance1, but he had stopped because of a new job.
While the JitArm64 is in a quite good shape, there are still some good ways to improve the performance and/or the accuracy. Compared to the X64 one, we eg lack for performance merging common used instructions (like CMP+BC), storing flags in register and carry within the host carry flag, and neither do we support emulating RET without calling the dispatcher. For accuracy, there are still some games which crash only on jitarm64. I'm on this task a few times per year

There are also some Android specific tasks (GL context creation, input handling, ...), but they don't matter much.

Next big block would be about all generic parts which are shared with the desktop version, but this is by far out of scope of such a forum answer.

[Helios]

If you like graphics stuff, there are a ton of driver bugs you can go to town on working around.

[Comrade]

Thanks for the replies guys. I am excited to put my head into this. I will try to get set-up and started this weekend. I hope to catch you on freenode.

[brujo5]

people like you are much needed here, thank you.

[degasus]

Did you have success?

[Comrade]

(05-24-2016, 06:18 AM)degasus Wrote: Did you have success?

still getting things set up, about to go on vacation for the weekend, I should be at it by Wednesday next week

[Abz145]

(05-26-2016, 10:50 AM)Comrade Wrote: still getting things set up, about to go on vacation for the weekend, I should be at it by Wednesday next week

Yes. This is good. So I'm guessing your going to start tomorrow. Hopefully you will surprise us with your magic.