Killer Instinct

For those of you who aren't on Discord or my socials, I'm working on a Killer Instinct 1/2 arcade emulator. It started out as a product of client interest and was going to be my main project to pay the bills this year, but then the client pulled out:

https://bsky.app/profile/richwhitehouse.bsky.social/post/3llcxu74wvk2x

https://x.com/DickWhitehouse/status/1905043313968992666

So I went to social media to see if I could get some crowd support. So far, that's only translated into 3 paying members here. To those 3 of you, thank you! That's not going to offset the tens of thousands of dollars I lost when the client pulled out, but well, I'll take whatever I can get. I'm still going to have to try to find some kind of contract work to offset this sudden loss and have not had any luck yet.

I outlined the planned features for the emulator pretty well in those social threads, but every part of BigPEmu that isn't doing actual Jaguar emulation is shared with BigInstinct, as will be the case with BigPSX. This has already led to some improvements which feed back to things which affect BigPEmu, including some improvements to net code and some other platform/scripting functionality. I'll be doing another BigPEmu build in the not too distant future mainly just so that everyone can benefit from that stuff as it gets added for the KI emulator.

Oh yeah, and while I can't actually be very specific about the client who pulled out (still under NDA even though we never signed a work/license agreement), I can say it was not the actual IP owner, and they mostly just wanted this emulator to target one or two particular hardware devices. It would be nice to still be able to end up selling this thing back to Rare/Microsoft, which I don't think would be a problem with any agreement I did have (in terms of the usual "you can't go after our clients as soon as you learn who our clients are" language) as long as it doesn't cause any problems for the client's product. It could potentially do the opposite, as Rare might be willing to provide the finished emulator to them under a sublicense. I don't know if there's any realistic business case for that, though.

The health situation is still sucking, but my wretched insurance finally agreed to send me over for genetic counseling. The person I talked to there seems confident that the thyroid cancer and subsequent autoimmune-looking problems are related to one or more rare genetic disorders, and by the time I talked to them, they'd already gone to the trouble of finding medical records for my family that even my family didn't know about. Apparently my grandmother never told any of the kids she had colon cancer. I'm still waiting on results for those tests. None of them would actually be "good" news, and from what I gather the only consequence for diagnosis is "more aggressive screening for lots of different types of cancer", but I'd be happy to know what's killing my ass either way. And of course, it could affect my daughter.

Right now, I'm working on getting my Irish citizenship (my grandmother was born there) and trying very hard to make it viable for my daughter to have an optional future in Ireland. America finally crossed the "Oh Look, We're the Nazis" threshold for me, and I don't trust that it's not going to go full Fourth Reich after I've kicked the bucket. That's going to be financially problematic to pull off too, but the plan is to initially keep pretty much everything in storage over here while trying to get established over there. I'm looking into taking a part-time salary position or something along those lines, but I don't know what attitudes are like over there when it comes to hiring cripples. I owe it to my daughter to give her options, or I would be long-resigned to curling up in a ball and dying in the furnace of America.

Thanks again to everyone who keeps on supporting me. Especially in light of this recent contract loss, you are once again the only thing keeping the lights on.