Is E-Maculation dying?

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Is E-Maculation dying?

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JonathonWyble
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Is E-Maculation dying?

Post by JonathonWyble »

I was just wondering. Because it seems that this community isn't very active, and almost everyone is barely online. Though the front page of the E-Maculation wiki claims that this site runs a busy community, it doesn't really seem like it (no offense, this is a pretty nice place). Did something happen? Or has E-Maculation always been like this? I think this community is not dead, because even though there's not much traffic here, most of the forum sections do seem constantly active. Tell us what you think.
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adespoton
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Re: Is E-Maculation dying?

Post by adespoton »

Being a relative newcomer of around 10 years (I just used to lurk before that), I can say that there's been more activity on here (especially in the SheepShaver and QEMU forums) over the past year than I've seen before, other than the single QEMU thread that started building momentum in 2015 and has since tapered off a bit.

This isn't a site where you will see hundreds of people talking about the latest in Macintosh emulation on a daily basis; it IS a site where new developments are discussed and figured out, and we've got a rich archive of questions and answers -- and so there's a lot of people who come here, read the info they need, and move on.

And then of course there's the regular updates of emulator builds for everyone to use.

Definitely not dying; the host and moderators are all active, and there's a healthy core of users contributing new content weekly, if not daily.
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Re: Is E-Maculation dying?

Post by JonathonWyble »

adespoton wrote:Being a relative newcomer of around 10 years (I just used to lurk before that), I can say that there's been more activity on here (especially in the SheepShaver and QEMU forums) over the past year than I've seen before, other than the single QEMU thread that started building momentum in 2015 and has since tapered off a bit.

This isn't a site where you will see hundreds of people talking about the latest in Macintosh emulation on a daily basis; it IS a site where new developments are discussed and figured out, and we've got a rich archive of questions and answers -- and so there's a lot of people who come here, read the info they need, and move on.

And then of course there's the regular updates of emulator builds for everyone to use.

Definitely not dying; the host and moderators are all active, and there's a healthy core of users contributing new content weekly, if not daily.
Oh okay, thanks for telling me that.

I'm guessing one other reason this community could be a little run down is that it consists of emulators for Macintosh operating systems, some of those emulators, like SheepShaver, ceased to exist over ten years ago. Just a guess.
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adespoton
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Re: Is E-Maculation dying?

Post by adespoton »

Out of curiosity, have you been viewing these forums by "view unread posts"?

I ask because this past week has involved 4 updates to SheepShaver and significant discussion about emulation improvements. Version 2.5 just got released last summer, and has been seeing regular updates. Two years ago we figured it was dead and all effort was going into QEMU, but since then a number of people have jumped on board to modernize SheepShaver emulation.

I haven't seen any drop-off recently on here; rather the reverse. Definitely not run down. I've also seen an uptick in links to here from other sites and blogs recently.
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Re: Is E-Maculation dying?

Post by JonathonWyble »

adespoton wrote:Out of curiosity, have you been viewing these forums by "view unread posts"?
Yes I do. I always read new topics and topics with new replies.
adespoton wrote:I ask because this past week has involved 4 updates to SheepShaver and significant discussion about emulation improvements. Version 2.5 just got released last summer, and has been seeing regular updates. Two years ago we figured it was dead and all effort was going into QEMU, but since then a number of people have jumped on board to modernize SheepShaver emulation.
Yeah, but according to the Wikipedia page on SheepShaver, this emulator has not had a stable release since its 2.3 release on May 14, 2006.
adespoton wrote:I haven't seen any drop-off recently on here; rather the reverse. Definitely not run down. I've also seen an uptick in links to here from other sites and blogs recently.
I know this forum is constantly active, like I said, and some of the forum sections here do get packed with lots of topics, such as the SheepShaver forum, which now has over 2,535 topics and over 19,445 posts (during the time I'm writing this post).
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adespoton
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Re: Is E-Maculation dying?

Post by adespoton »

If you look at the edit page for the Wikipedia article, you'll notice that other than link fixes, it hasn't really been updated since 2012.
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Re: Is E-Maculation dying?

Post by JonathonWyble »

Oh, I see.

Anyway, let's not have off-topic chatter in here. What we are currently talking about doesn't have much to do with this poll. Just saying :wink:
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adespoton
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Re: Is E-Maculation dying?

Post by adespoton »

Back to the question:
I was just wondering
Wonder no more :) We like to answer questions here.
it seems that this community isn't very active
Depends on your definition of active, but it's been consistent for two decades, and busier recently.
almost everyone is barely online
Almost everyone on this site is a lurker :)
Though the front page of the E-Maculation wiki claims that this site runs a busy community
The community is indeed busy; it's just not Reddit-level large. But considering this site has been up since the previous millennium with continual updates, I'd say it's doing pretty well :) Some of the busyness of this community happens outside the forums themselves, as many who post here are working on Mac emulation-related projects. This place enables us all to have somewhere to communicate and discuss projects and emulators.
it doesn't really seem like it (no offense, this is a pretty nice place)
No offense taken, but what makes you think it doesn't seem like the community is busy? I'm still trying to figure out your metric ("it feels dead to me" is a perfectly fine answer).
Did something happen?
This is pretty much what you can expect from here, day in, day out, for over 20 years.
Or has E-Maculation always been like this?
Bingo :)
I think this community is not dead, because even though there's not much traffic here, most of the forum sections do seem constantly active.
I'm unsure what you mean by "not much traffic" vs. "constantly active" here; do you mean that there are only a small number of people regularly posting? Or do you mean that there aren't people submitting new emulators for discussion, or something else? Mac Emulation is a pretty niche field; I think you'll find this place has a smaller active community than places like 68kmla and Macintosh Garden, but a larger active community than MacOS9 Lives or EmuScene.[/list]
I do wonder why you keep insisting/guessing that the community is a little run down though; from what I can see, it's not run down at all. The reason you gave for thinking it's run down is based on outdated information (is WikiPedia a little run down because nobody's updated its SheepShaver page in 7 years? Our SheepShaver Wiki page hasn't been updated in 2 years, but the forum links to builds and new features from a few days ago), so I'm trying to figure out what you're trying to get at here.

If you have questions about the site, feel free to ask! There's no need to guess about things; there are a number of us who are more than willing to discuss things here :)

As for the poll itself, polling people about whether the site is dying is a bit odd, and probably won't get much of a response, other than from me and possibly a couple of others.

The reason it's a bit odd is that this isn't a social media site; it's a resource site where we document Macintosh emulation, discuss new features in emulators, and answer questions from people having difficulty using the emulators. So the measures of success for this site are: 1) Is Clockwise still running it? 2) is it driving updates to Mac emulators? and 3) do people still find it a useful resource?

It's had a few years here and there where not much happened, but even then, it wasn't dying. It's still based on phpBB3, but that's partially so that it's compatible with old browsers attempting to access the site.

I hope that helps explain things a bit more; feel free to ask more questions as you have them.
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Re: Is E-Maculation dying?

Post by Jorpho »

I agree; this board seems to have been increasing in activity as of late.
JonathonWyble wrote:Yeah, but according to the Wikipedia page on SheepShaver, this emulator has not had a stable release since its 2.3 release on May 14, 2006.
I'm not sure why, but it seems to be very common for open-source projects to have some ancient "stable" release and a vastly-improved "WIP" version tucked away somewhere that's perfectly usable, but which no one wants to call "official" yet despite the fact that no one would recommend using the "stable" release anymore.
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adespoton
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Re: Is E-Maculation dying?

Post by adespoton »

Jorpho wrote:I'm not sure why, but it seems to be very common for open-source projects to have some ancient "stable" release and a vastly-improved "WIP" version tucked away somewhere that's perfectly usable, but which no one wants to call "official" yet despite the fact that no one would recommend using the "stable" release anymore.
This is generally true, and often has to do with the fact that a forked WIP branch tends to see much more activity than the base -- and often the owner of the base loses interest and so the WIP branch becomes the de-facto one. In this case, it's a mix, as the base was transferred back in 2012, but at the same time, it's kanjitalk's WIP branch that's getting all the attention of late. So Wikipedia is out of date, plus the "unstable" branch is ahead of the stable one by a significant margin.

It probably doesn't help things that the builds are being linked on an old post in these forums but the discussion thread was on a mail list and has now partially moved to github.
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Ronald P. Regensburg
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Re: Is E-Maculation dying?

Post by Ronald P. Regensburg »

JonathonWyble wrote:Yeah, but according to the Wikipedia page on SheepShaver, this emulator has not had a stable release since its 2.3 release on May 14, 2006.
Well, depends on what one calls a stable release. It is the latest release by Gwenole Beauchesne, who abandoned the project shortly after that. Development of SheepShaver and BasiliskII has gone a long way since.

SheepShaver/BasiliskII has known different individual developers in succession. The last one who more or less 'owned' the project was Gwenole Beauchesne. The source code was taken over by others and moved a couple of times, since 2012 it is at https://github.com/cebix/macemu

Many different developers, users with programmer skills and often members of our Emaculation community, have helped the project forward. Always one person guarded the code and decided which proposed changes would be incorporated.

Several forked the code and started their own branches. The code that is now used by me for my OSX/macOS builds is at https://github.com/kanjitalk755/macemu
kanjitalk755 is also a member here. He is actively involved with the development and very responsive to suggestions for features and fixes proposed by others.
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Re: Is E-Maculation dying?

Post by JonathonWyble »

Ronald P. Regensburg wrote:
JonathonWyble wrote:Yeah, but according to the Wikipedia page on SheepShaver, this emulator has not had a stable release since its 2.3 release on May 14, 2006.
Well, depends on what one calls a stable release. It is the latest release by Gwenole Beauchesne, who abandoned the project shortly after that. Development of SheepShaver and BasiliskII has gone a long way since.

SheepShaver/BasiliskII has known different individual developers in succession. The last one who more or less 'owned' the project was Gwenole Beauchesne. The source code was taken over by others and moved a couple of times, since 2012 it is at https://github.com/cebix/macemu

Many different developers, users with programmer skills and often members of our Emaculation community, have helped the project forward. Always one person guarded the code and decided which proposed changes would be incorporated.

Several forked the code and started their own branches. The code that is now used by me for my OSX/macOS builds is at https://github.com/kanjitalk755/macemu
kanjitalk755 is also a member here. He is actively involved with the development and very responsive to suggestions for features and fixes proposed by others.
I thought a "stable release" is another term for "latest release". But I also heard it just means the release of a program that is safe to use and isn't rather buggy than its previous releases. But yeah, Wikipedia has lied before, so I think I would blame them for having most of their content over five years out of date, LOL.
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Re: Is E-Maculation dying?

Post by uyjulian »

JonathonWyble wrote:
Ronald P. Regensburg wrote:
JonathonWyble wrote:Yeah, but according to the Wikipedia page on SheepShaver, this emulator has not had a stable release since its 2.3 release on May 14, 2006.
Well, depends on what one calls a stable release. It is the latest release by Gwenole Beauchesne, who abandoned the project shortly after that. Development of SheepShaver and BasiliskII has gone a long way since.

SheepShaver/BasiliskII has known different individual developers in succession. The last one who more or less 'owned' the project was Gwenole Beauchesne. The source code was taken over by others and moved a couple of times, since 2012 it is at https://github.com/cebix/macemu

Many different developers, users with programmer skills and often members of our Emaculation community, have helped the project forward. Always one person guarded the code and decided which proposed changes would be incorporated.

Several forked the code and started their own branches. The code that is now used by me for my OSX/macOS builds is at https://github.com/kanjitalk755/macemu
kanjitalk755 is also a member here. He is actively involved with the development and very responsive to suggestions for features and fixes proposed by others.
I thought a "stable release" is another term for "latest release". But I also heard it just means the release of a program that is safe to use and isn't rather buggy than its previous releases. But yeah, Wikipedia has lied before, so I think I would blame them for having most of their content over five years out of date, LOL.
Anyone can edit Wikipedia. Feel free to edit the page if it makes you happier.
JonathonWyble
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Re: Is E-Maculation dying?

Post by JonathonWyble »

julialy wrote:Snip
Anyone can edit Wikipedia. Feel free to edit the page if it makes you happier.
Actually, I'm fine. Ronald was right about how the original SheepShaver creator abandoned the program in 2006. I was just making a statement. It's good that SheepShaver is still alive, thanks to the E-Maculation community! Even though I'd never really choose to use those types of emulators.
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