home
the snickerblog
washDC gitlab
hardware tests
tools
social media
Discord
e-mail
23 Jun 2020

Abandoning the WashingtonDC Project Due to Medical Issues

I really regret having listened to the doctor I mentioned in the last snickerblog post who said the thing growing in my leg was nothing to worry about. Basically, I had been sent to see somebody who is supposed to know what she's talking about because she has an M.D. in Oncology from Harvard University, she told me the large lump in my leg didn't need to be biopsied because it was obviously just a hematoma, and she monitored it for about a year during which time it steadily got smaller. Then over the course of the past couple of months (about the same timeframe as the coronavirus apocalypse albeit unrelated) I noticed it looked like my leg was getting bigger again.

Towards the end of May, I had a previously scheduled ultrasound appointment so the oncologist could monitor its progress, and that showed the growth had become significantly larger. The Oncologist was alarmed but still informed me over the phone that it would be "unheard of" for a tumor to shrink without treatment and then start growing again like mine had. Eventually a sudden bought of pain drove me to the emergency room at the hospital, where they biopsied it and confirmed that it is indeed a type of cancer called Synovial Sarcoma.

So unfortunately the situation is that I don't know how much longer I'm going to be alive. From what I gather this is definitely not the sort of cancer where you can afford to wait an entire year to begin treatment because it's incurable after it metastasizes, and even if it hasn't metastatized it still has a tendency to reoccur. I'm starting the first of 8 rounds of chemotherapy soon and I'm going to get the primary tumor removed surgically.

I wish this story had a real obvious moral like "don't listen to traditional herbalists instead of real doctors", but the person I was getting my advice from was actually supposed to be a real doctor and she still gave be dangerous advice that might have already killed me so IDK.

I don't expect to be able to work on WashingtonDC during my cancer treatment, and even if I survive this I don't know if I can keep working on a large-scale project alone knowing that I'll have a reduced life expectency so I've decided to abandon the project. I may come back to it if I survive, or I may leave it abandoned forever and get involved with a larger group project where I know my work won't all go to waste if I die.

WashingtonDC has been moved to the 3-clause BSD license to maximize the amount of ways its code can be useful to anybody who may need it. This is a feature-complete Dreamcast emulator which was going to be better than its competitors given just a few more years of dev work. I had plans and infrastructure to support all sorts of cool features like Windows CE games, a Vulkan renderer, NAOMI arcade emulation and even a Wii U homebrew port but unfortunately that will probably never happen now.

The relicensing has forced me to ditch support for .cdi homebrew images because that was GPL code I had copied over from lxdream. That's unfortunate but it shouldn't be too hard to code up a replacement since this isn't "real" emulation code; it's just code to load an image of a CD in a certain file format from the host computer's filesystem. The only other bit of WashingtonDC code I didn't write was the ADPCM decoding stuff in AICA; that had been copied from FFMPEG (LGPL) but I was able to replace it with equivalent code from MAME which is already under the 3-clause BSD license. Other than those two bits of code which have already been taken care of, I am the sole author and copyright holder of WashingtonDC so I have the authority to do this licensing unilaterally. Unlike other emulators which have made similar license changes, there are no assblasted formed contributors who claim to still hold copyrights on part of the codebase, so if you use WashingtonDC's code for your project you can be assurred it's completely legitimately available under the terms of the 3-clause BSD license.

Anyways, it now occurrs to be that it's been over a year since the last snickerblog post so I may as well go over some of the things which I've gotten accomplished in that time. I've never been a big fan of the way certain emudevs hype themselves up and make an /r/emulation post every time they take a shit, but perhaps in retrospect I should have done that maybe a little so people would know how much work I do/did.

Those are just the major things that took a lot of time, there were also smaller things too, and the things on that list were all multi-month endeavors. I was working on this emulator almost every day since I started on October 14, 2016.

All posts