Hatari team ethics

[Steven Seagal]

Notice that some Steem SSE insights are translated into Hatari without any mention of Steem SSE, seemingly ignoring the posts at atari-forum, not participating in emulation discussions, then doing like they found everything themselves.

Here for example was a little insight about DMA sound.
It is no great insight, not hard to find, but the fact is that I published it first (without knowing if it was already in Hatari or not) in the Coming soon! thread for Steem SSE 3.8 at atari-forum:



This post was viewed but not answered.
A few hours later, we can see in Hatari codebase:



Notice no mention of Steem SSE (2nd arrow), but in another case (3rd arrow), there's mention of the source (WinUAE, which is also a source of inspiration for Steem SSE).


link


Good job!




This obvious case to illustrate, but there are others.

Nothing wrong with getting your inspiration from elsewhere, I do it all the time, but don't pretend it's all from you.

So I created this post, to inform the emulation people that some Steem insights are copied in Hatari (just like some Hatari insights are copied in Steem), because the Hatari team won't inform you.

[alexh]

I would imagine the code for arrow 3 comes straight from WinUAE beta character for character whereas the idea for arrow 2 comes from yourself but the code comes from Mr.STYCKX?

You sure there are no credits elsewhere?

What does it really matter? The free dissemination of information is what open source projects like these are for?

[Greyfox™]

That is a shame for this to be happening, and without causing a war or having no acknowledgements and accusations flung at each, I do agree that is something has been added or enchanted to these two amazing emulators, that they should give credit to either the person in this case Steven Seagal for the finding or acknowledge the improvement based on Steem engine or vice versa, to claim or add features to your emulator when clearly they been used or introduced without mentioning the person behind it, isn't really fair now is it?

[troed]

Steven, what's the real beef? My name is not on the "Improve blank line detection" commit even though that one is the result of a mail conversation directly between Nicolas and myself. Why should it be?

I'm sure you sometimes forget to credit information you pick up from forum and mailing lists posts yourself. IMHO the real credit should always be to the one who wrote the edge case in code that you're trying to emulate (thus the name of the demo in question).

[AtariZoll]

Sometimes it is really something simple. Similar issue with audio DMA was in MIST too - what was solved with help of this forum, as I remember. Really did not look about was it mentioned/credited in some changelog.
Question is where is that line of value when it should be credited.
Just looked some changelogs considering updates based on my research and suggestion:
"- in 68000 mode, remove some un-allowed for CMPI, BTST and TST
- check for address error when new PC is set at the end of RTE, RTS and RTR
- fix "move.b an,", it's not allowed and should give illegal instruction"
Not mentioned - even if I wrote special test SW for that purpose. Same is with FDC emulation rotation speed suggestions - later is interesting because someone of team asked here about who discovered that problem (Microprose Golf case).
It may be just that someone else maintains new release PR, and don't care about crediting at all.

[npomarede]

Notice that some Steem SSE insights are translated into Hatari without any mention of Steem SSE, seemingly ignoring the posts at atari-forum, not participating in emulation discussions, then doing like they found everything themselves.

Seriously ?! Not participating in emulation discussion ? You must be kidding, it seems you even forgot some of *your* posts where I answered you some years ago with some problems you had in Steem.

Is that not participating in emulation :
- I helped IFW / kryolfux team to improve the support for WD1772 CTR/IPF emulation, spending dozens of hours doing tests on my STF and exchanging lots of email with him during several months. With This, Hatari was the first ST emulator that supported CTR/IPF and you benefited from all the work that was made when adding this in Steem.
- Hatari documents all of the finding that were made to improve emulation, just look at the source code I think it's very detailled (but you already did, since at one time you ripped entire parts of Hatari to put them into Steem, not asking us before and most of all, not respecting the GPL)
- We used WinUAE cpu core in Hatari ; while doing so, I reported several bugs/fixes to Toni so he could backport them into WinUAE. And guess what ? My name is not credited, neither is Hatari. And you know what ? I don't care, maybe you see this as an ego contest, I see this as the followup to the time 20 years ago where we were all in the demoscene and made a lot of friends there (but maybe you didn't know that time)
- As Troed told, we also swapped a lot of emails regarding video emulation. His work on documentating the video timings is really valuable and he will be credited in next Hatari version.
- Several people in Hatari are evolved in Emutos and provided code to it ; and several Emutos people are also reporting bugs/problems on Hatari mailing list to see where it comes from (sometimes it's an emulation problem in Hatari, sometimes Emutos is wrong (for example, we helped them fixing floppy drive detection code that was wrong before))
- Some code in Hatari regarding MMU/DSP came from other emulators, then it was improved, then the new code was backported to these emulators (Next emulator for example)

Now, OK, I admit I saw you reported 'a little bit of everything' as not working ; so I tried it under Hatari and it was fixed in less than 30 seconds, no need to look at steem's code. Do you want me to credit you just for that ? As you even say it was reported to you by someone else, without naming him.

The difference between you and me maybe : I don't brag about any new fix I had for such or such demo/game, claiming Steem to be the best emulator or first to support such or such effect. I don't have time for that.

As for crediting people, please have a look at doc/authors.txt : all people that participated by idea, small patches, reporting bugs, ... are there (and this also includes you AtariZoll, you're credited for the time we spent on microprose golf and for your useful opcode validator ). WinUAE is also credited. We also credit code from other projects.
Hatari team certainly never claimed that we found everything ourselves (even I think that Hatari has some unique accuracy features, based on hundreds of hours of tests I made on my STF/STE)

So, I don't see your point ; it seems that in many discussions over the years in this forum, you often feel offended for no real reason with different people (for example, I remember you were very upset because Steem was not mentioned on kryoflux page).
You made your point, I made mine, people will observe and decide what to think about this, let's move on ...

Nicolas

[AtariZoll]

Thanx npomarede for clarifying things. Probably people don't expect to see contributors in file named authors

[ijor]

Come on. Let's calm down everybody. We never had this kind of problem in the ST scene (we had other problems , but not this one).

I know Nicolas, and I doubt he had any kind of bad intentions. So many people contribute to this kind of work that it's impossible to remember, let alone to credit them properly. And sometimes does happen that a notable contribution is omitted. It happened to me more than once, and I never bothered. If you feel it is important then maybe better deal with this privately.

I do believe, and always said so, that emulators should mention previous generations that more than likely inspired them one way or the other, directly or indirectly. Current level of emulation accuracy would have been impossible without simpler and rudimentary emulators, like Winston and others precursors. Even when you code a new emulator from bare scratch, just seeing a different one helps. Helps a lot!

You know, there is one think I always liked at the old days when I was active. Steem authors, always extremely modest, linked to the competition at their web site. Leonard (Saint author) was also very modest and friendly.

[Steven Seagal]

Like I said I created this post to inform the emulation people that some Steem insights are copied in Hatari (just like some Hatari insights are copied in Steem), because the Hatari team won't inform you as is apparent from the screenshots.
Without this post, no one would be the wiser. Right or wrong?

I don't want to reply to every point, I prefer to stay on topic, but it's not about "me". I'm Steven Seagal, remember?
Where's the ego there seriously?
It's about Steem. It would be ridiculous to credit "Steven Seagal" with anything but bad DTV movies, but it wouldn't kill anybody to mention "from Steem" when appropriate like it can be done for WinUAE.

[lp]

As an end user and coder I can say almost no one reads documentation, let alone the credits, and that applies to about anything, not just emulators. Most people don't care, they are just happy to play some old game or enjoy some nostalgia. This thread was completely unnecessary since the same lame complaint is already at the website.

http://ataristeven.exxoshost.co.uk/Hatari_ethics.htm

[TheNameOfTheGame]

nvm...backs slowly out of thread.

[Eero Tamminen]

Your claim is preposterous and unprofessional.

As discussed in the "Stealing Hatari code" thread (http://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?t=21559), Steem license is GPL v3 and Hatari license is GPL v2 (or later). So, while you can legally "steal" Hatari code, Hatari developers cannot legally use [1] Steem code, so of course Nicolas won't do it. That would be too much of a disservice to our users, due to [1]. WinUAE is mentioned in the commit message, because in that case the code actually comes from there.

As to your bug report about Hatari emulation issue, your expectations are unrealistic. I've never heard of any project with a policy where bug reporters would be separately credited in commit messages, *unless* they've contributed an actual patch to the project, or developed a test-case/program for the issue. And I've seen many projects where one might not get attributed even then (now that it comes kind of automatically with Git, attributions for every patch have started to become more common, especially in larger projects as commit "paper trail" may be needed for IP auditing purposes).

In general, information about bugs is stored where the bug reporters make them; project bug tracker, in Hatari case either Hatari mailing list, or forum here. If somebody does a more significant amount of bug triaging, they can get notified separately in the Authors document (at least after asking for it, as otherwise we would not know what information people want of themselves there).

[1] To be precise, code can be used, but compiled binaries wouldn't anymore be legally distributable if GPL v3 code would be added to GPL v2+ project. Linux distros won't support non-distributable projects.

PS. As to attributions for information on how things work... You have a point. We haven't given attributions for all the great sources for the information (including things like toshyp.org, ST Internals and Atari Compedium books and their authors). However, my opinion is that such information is better documented outside of Hatari sources, like here in Atari-forum, as it's not Hatari specific.

[Steven Seagal]

I'd just like to qualify one thing in first post. Please read

"not participating in public emulation discussions"

instead of

"not participating in emulation discussions"

but I thought this was obvious.

@lp: people can't post replies on my site, let alone intelligent ones

[AtariZoll]

Well, I looked that DMA link from OP post. and it's only 3 days old (so was 1 when posted). I must admit that it is really upsetting to see how people takes idea(s), even if simple ones, without any mentioning of source. So, Steven is actually right when complains. There should be at least some reply in thread - like "thanx for that discovery - will help us ..." - if don't want to do it in changelog self.
I don't agree that no one reads supplied docs - surely not much people, but I did it many times - mostly not to see was I mentioned, but because I seen often familiar names.
And I don't agree that writing the code is always the hardest part. Sometimes is harder to find exact behavior of HW and explaining it. In case of Falcon that's exact reason why emulation is still far from desired, and not that Hatari team can not produce good code

[mfro]

Not that I care much, but truth must stay truth.

It's probably not too far-fetched that neither the Hatari nor Steem team had the bright idea initially (at least not solely), but to assume this post was the initial trigger to both. The date of the post is just too close to the course of action as to assume pure coincidence.

Neither of the contrahents considered mentioning it, however (and it's even possible the poster didn't notice at all).

If you'd ask me, it might be way better to invest excess energy into coding instead of argueing.

[simonsunnyboy]

If you'd ask me, it might be way better to invest excess energy into coding instead of argueing.

+1

[exxos]

A little off topic, but I've always had people stealing my ideas, not just Atari. I posted a lot of high voltage research on my old site, I stopped updating it when someone took out a patent on one of my prototype wireless power designs. Totally messed up all the values for everything, basically because I did not publish them. I only knew of these as some technology group overseas wanted me to go do a talk on the design, which just further angered me.

As for Atari, much nicer people these days than in the past, I got into so many arguments over my floppy kit design with people that I left the Atari scene for some years. Its also why my site was called "The LaST upgrade" as it marked my final work before leaving.

Its a shame when people like Steven work on a great program such as steem, and not mention his work if someone take his ideas or code. That would annoy me greatly.