Why Patreon now? (Patreon)

I have been active in the Mister community since the initial presentation of the GBA core end of 2019. Ever since I have been saying that I don't have a Patreon when I was asked. The reasons for me where simple: this should be my hobby and it should always be fun. In the end my nickname is nothing else than "FPGA for fun" in german.

I had a lot of fun with FPGAs before starting it as a profession in 2010, but after writing VHDL for about 3 years I gave it up completly. That doesn't mean that the job was bad (it was great!), but it's just that you often don't want to do even more of the same. After I changed the position inside the company to a software related job, the fun with FPGAs slowly came back.

So I feared that with Patreon and pressure to deliver, I would loose the fun again. Pressure doesn't have to be bad, in my daily work I like it much more than boredom. But loosing the fun kills creativity. Now more than 1 year passed and I worked on various topics.

I tried some more uncommon features for console FPGA cores like savestates and highres rendering. That is one thing that was always important to me: if I think about something and it sounds cool...I want to try it!  I burned my fingers with the DS core, hoping it would work well with the DE10-Nano. Later I jumped into the AO486 core for a short time with speedups but jumped out of the project nearly as quickly again, to do something even more obscure: the chess core.

But now comes the most important part: the community was always nice these days.  No complaints about anything I did and even more important, what I didn't do. I decided to not improve GBA core accuracy for a while and work on some cool feature instead? No problem at all, you were great all the time!

But why Patreon now? I could just work as before.

There are several reasons.

The first is the Lynx.  For the Lynx, being a not so well research system, I really need to have hardware and debug some details out of the system itself. And that's not really cheap. A Lynx itself is not and additional parts like flashcards and debug boards are also not. It already costs a (very) large amount of my time, so I think it's fair to distribute this project on many shoulders.

Another reason are the newer consoles. You all know my motivation for the Nintendo DS and maybe other newer consoles. As I was born end of the 80s, my nostalgia begins with mid to end of the 90s. So if I'm able to buy a nice development board to get one of these "newer" systems implemented, that would be great.

And the last reason and maybe the most important to do it now is the community itself. There are so many people who want to help in some way. Many of you have been very nice with testing, bugfixes, bug reports and other things. I see lots of known names every day when I join the MiSTer Discord servers, talking and helping newcomers to get a good start.

And here again: no complaints at all when I started this Patreon account. Instead nearly 100 people are now already here to support my work. After only 1 week!

Well, it's a wall of text now and I hope you are not asleep already, but I had to say these words.

A big thanks to all of you!