WACUP Development Update November 2021 (Patreon)

Related to expanding the range of platforms, thanks to your support I did splash out on being a corporate supporting monster & picked up a discounted Raspberry Pi 400 during the black Friday 'month' that seems to go on where I am.s is stability is at a point that I'm happy with (as I hope is the case for the beta testers) & how WACUP runs under WINE is improved (something that is useful as I know there's a fair few who like to use WACUP in such a manner).

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The work on WINE over the past week is something that's cropped up as being needed a few times & am sure some would like I also had the view point in it's down to WINE to improve rather than I do changes on my side.

My view point has slightly changed over time as having WINE be 100% compatible (much like I'm trying to do with WACUP) isn't always realistic especially when it's only recently that WINE resolved a number of issues that were affecting WACUP/Winamp with window handling.

That's why it's been simpler to make some changes on my side to resolve mostly visual related issues which were already lower with the WACUP provided skinning support compared to some of the weirdness seen with the skinning from the 5.666 library core plug-in.

So with these changes though there's still some more that need investigating to get close to parity between Windows & WINE, I've now added WINE 6.x to the range of platforms that I'm supporting.

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Related to expanding the range of platforms, thanks to all of your support I did splash out on being a corporate supporting monster & picked up a discounted (so I make your money go further) Raspberry Pi 400 during the black Friday 'month' that seems to go on where I am (not sure what it's like elsewhere including the US).

The aim of buying this is initially to allow for testing the Windows ARM64 builds that I want to start providing at some point during 2022 (along with the more normal native Windows 64-bit version). With the ever increasing rise of ARM related to desktop (though it's fair to say that Windows + ARM hasn't been the greatest of experiences in the past), ignoring this trend is something that I don't think can be ignored.

That's why being able to make & test ARM64 builds myself instead of just blindly building things & not being able to test it myself is going to be useful . As I also know that WACUP can already run on a Raspberry Pi 4 under Windows 10 for ARM but it's happening via a translation layer (impressive on it's own that this even works!) whereas a native version should be an even better experience especially for resource usage & everyone would like a warmcup :)

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One other thing to note is that I finally got around to doing some of the clean-up & behind the scene changes to allow for adding new beta testers again. I do however still need to finish off the landing page to better set out my expectations from those wanting to beta test as having spent 2 days removing over 300 accounts wasn't a good use of my time.

Going forward I am going to have to be somewhat more ruthless in how I accept requests as my prior if you've shown interest I'll add you approach became unmanageable after a point vs often not seeing those users even interact let alone download the builds (am guessing either bots &/or some form of FOMO going on but not then wanting to actually test).

One aspect that I've still to decide on doing is that I was considering making it so that if you're a patron you get beta access as a default benefit but trying to connect here with the forum software that is otherwise used to manage the beta access (a mistake maybe in hindsight but it otherwise saves me a load of other issues) isn't something I've yet figured out.

However as the process to add a new beta tester is now much simpler on my part that might not be something I need to do & will just keep relying on needing a valid WACUP forum account with access based on that.

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As far as development goes, can I get a new preview build out before the year is over, hopefully so since I'm only 3 months out at the moment vs my prior expectations of an August preview build so we shall see what happens.

Like normal you can see the build specific changelogs at https://getwacup.com/changelog/ to have a look over of the past 2 builds which will be quicker to read over compared to what';s going on the overall changelog from the last preview build which is now sat at over 410 lines (eek!).

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One final thing is that this patreon finally passed 100 active supporters this month which is a milestone that I never really expected to reach so a thank you to all who are supporting me doing this & also to those who've supported it before. If I've tracked it correctly there's been 135 of you lovely people over the time this has been running though I don't know how many it's been from direct donations (something I maybe should work out eventually for my curiosity).

As it really does mean a lot to have the support to be able to keep being able to work on WACUP ❤ Now back to the coding pit I go 🤣

-dro