Donations would very welcome! Either as reward for the work that I've already done, or for covering my expenses on future projects/updates (that's mainly food/rent, unfortunately even those minimal expenses for basic requirements can sum up when spending 1-3 months on researching or developing new stuff).
For becoming a patron,
click here.
Patreon is some sort of fundraiser, allowing to support creators with
monthly donations.
For credit cards,
click here,
select currency and amount, then key in your card details.
Credit card transfers should work worldwide, with international transaction
fees are less than 3% plus some cents (paid by the recipient; not by the
sender), which is ways cheaper than overseas bank transfers.
16HLwn5o9DQuCPot8btPLZEG6xXsCwm612 |
For bitcoin donations scan the QR code on the left, or click the wallet number underneath of the QR code (or copy/paste the wallet number if your browser doesn't handle bitcoin links), and then chose how much would like to donate.
If you've never used bitcoins: First you'll need to create a wallet,
ie. simply download
a bitcoin utility (I've picked Electrum). The tool will automatically generate
a random seed based wallet for you (be sure to backup that seed value,
and to keep it secret in safe place, there's no 'bitcoin authority' that
could help you to recover your money if you've lost that seed value, or if
somebody steals the value).
Advantages are that bitcoins have very low transfer fees (without extra fees for international transactions), and there aren't any paypal-like institutions envolved (which could ban you because they don't like your appearance). Concerning anonymity, my understanding is that wallet-to-wallet transaction are fairly transparent, so bitcoins aren't as anonymous as most people think, and governments might track down your identity as soon as the transaction enters the real world (eg. when exchanging bitcoins for real money). On the other hand, the raw transactions are done without information on the sender's name and without information on the purpose of the transaction, so the recipient may have no clue where the money came from what for. |
Martin Korth
| |
Hamburger Sparkasse (Germany)
| |
DE04200505501276456231
| |
HASPDEHHXXX
|
From outside Europe, there may be quite high transaction fees
(something like $20 for sending money from US to germany,
which is rather ridiculous for small amounts).
Workarounds could be using services like
TransferWise or
Western Union
which allow to send money to foreign bank accounts at lower fees.
After joining the being banned on paypal club, I've had to investigate
alternatives - there are in fact dozens or hundreds of alternatives for online
transactions, but most aren't really suitable for donations on freeware
projects:
Many services are available only in usa, or only in other countries,
or donation buttons are supported only on business accounts, or only
to registered charity organizations, or the services are allowing only
payments for material goods, but not donations. And, they aren't exchangeable;
one cannot send money from service A to service B.
After all, I came up with two methods which seemed to be most reliable and
most trustworthy to me: Bitcoins, and transfers to regular bank accounts.
As by now, I can't say how they will work out in practice. But I can say one
thing: Never rely on paypal. They can close your account without warning, and
without even explaining why they are closing it. If you are relying on that
company then there's really something wrong. Better stop using them now,
else they may kick you out when you least expect it.
Only reason for sending donations would that people might appreciate the work that I am doing, and might want to enable me to continue doing that work.
What I am doing is working on several
emulation, debugging, and hardware documentation projects for
several systems. All of them are still in development,
although I have focused on NDS/DSi, PSX, and SNES in past some months, but the
older 8bit projects are also updated once or when, or at least planned to be
so someday.
I am normally working seven days a week, or around 350 days per year,
though updates are released less frequently: I am normally collecting a bunch
of new features to get a massive and stable update together, one drawback is
that I am often working slower and slower when getting close to the release day
(getting stuck on evil "final details" which have summed up on the todo list,
and which are somewhat required to be implemented before release).
The emulation part is maybe just one emulator among dozens of similar
ones, the only special feature might be that the no$emus are aimed at being
faster than others, mainly because I like efficient software that runs on
low-end hardware, and because the emulation (and debugger and user interface
and everything) is written in plain assembler (ASM) code, without a single
line of high-level-language (HLL) code.
The debugging functions are probably more
confusing and less interesting to most people,
however, homebrew programmers have reported them to be useful, or even
extremly useful. In the past, the CGB, GBA, and NDS debuggers have been also
used by a number of professional game developers.
Some people also reported that they started learning programming after they
first got in touch with the no$debuggers in their childhood.
The hardware docs like gbatek,
psx-spx, and fullsnes
started as some side-effect, where I've scribbled down everything that
I've learned when studying the systems. The docs are quite comprehensive,
and well, many programmers seem to be really liking those docs.
Surprisingly, even non-programmers are occassionally confessing that they
have read the whole document, although they didn't understand anything.
One of my project goals is helping people to get in touch with
the functionality of daily-life electronics like gaming consoles, which are
being a nice example because they are widespread and many children grew up
with them, and, they are having standarized hardware which can be programmed
directly without going through operating system functions or software drivers
- and modern consoles might appear to be mysteriously working magic toys,
but they are still programmed by, and programmable by mere humans.
What I need to keep the project going is around 600 EUR/month.
That is, for a cheap flat (one working room, one living/sleeping room, and
a kitchen with leaking roof), food, tobacco, coffee, electricity, internet,
occassional drinks at local underground discos, plus unexpected expenses
like hair shampou.
That 600 EUR is pretty close to the limit needed for living in hamburg/germany,
still it's quite a lot of money.
When I am up to some new hardware, I can forget about time and everything
and spend a month or two on reasearching formerly undocumented hardware details.
And when I am done with it, I am often ending up as That was cool, but,
oops, where's the money gone that I did have when I started working on that
project?
Oh, and what I have is nothing: No regular income. I am working
fulltime on the no$project and I really like doing that work.
I might be able to keep the projects going when working halftime on some
real-world job, but I would really prefer to be able to continue working
fulltime.
With thousands of downloads per day it could be probably possible to collect
20 EUR/day just via donations. But of course, it's up to everybody to decide
whether or not they want to donate something for my stuff
(and whether they can afford to do so).
Many Thanks
to everybody who is donating something,
or who already donated something in the past,
no matter if it's a big or small amount,
- your support is really valuable to me!
And thanks for reading. Or if you didn't read any of the above the stuff,
sorry about writing that much crap.
back to
nocash homepage
debugging - development - emulation - machine code - tools - research - specifications