Bizhawk Bug Filers need approved set of "Upstream" emulators

[Meerkov]

When filing bugs in games, the first reply is inevitably "did you test in upstream". However people filing bugs that use BizHawk may have no idea what this means. Therefore, an approved set of links to upstream emulators are necessary to expedite the reproduction process.

[YoshiRulz]

As you were told on Discord, ported cores have their name shown in the status bar, and should have a hyperlink in Help > About.... GPGX is unique in that there is no standalone desktop app to compare to.

Links could be added to this table in the readme (edit: as below), but I fear that would make it too information-dense. I think writing a guide specifically for reporting bugs in games would be better in the long-term; a good chunk of our bugs are that kind, but we have about 2 lines total of documentation for it at the moment.

System	Core(s)
Game Boy / Color	Gambatte, GBHawk, SameBoy
Game Boy Advance	mGBA
Intellivision	IntelliHawk
MSX	MSXHawk
N64	Ares64, Mupen64Plus
NDS	melonDS
Neo Geo Pocket	NeoPop

[vadosnaprimer]

Upstream column in that table would be exactly for telling people what to test on, so I don't see a problem in one more column.

[YoshiRulz]

(Edited my previous comment to show a sample table.)

Pointing to "the upstream" for each core is complicated by the fact that we generally aren't keeping up with updates for them; we should really be pointing testers at the standalone version matching the one we include, and not just the latest or the project's homepage. Hence I think expanding the table in the readme won't be sufficient.

[vadosnaprimer]

Like in the GPGX's case, we can backport individual fixes if we can't afford updating the whole thing. And people telling us how everything works upstream is all the more nag to pull from it properly (which is why newly ported cores are organized to make it as easy as possible).

[nattthebear]

Ported cores have their name shown in the status bar, and should have a hyperlink in Help > About....

Given that this is the case, I don't feel we need to do anything else. Is this ticket about frustration finding upstreams in general, or just GPGX-specific?

[Meerkov]

This ticket is about all cores, not gpgx specific. GPGX does not appear in the bug title or description.