ARM-based PS2 emulator AetherSX2 suspends development indefinitely
"AetherSX2 was always meant to be a fun hobby for me, not profit driven," writes Tahlreth. "It doesn't make sense to continue working on a hobby which isn't fun anymore." They also warn of a number of "scammers" and imposters on social media who claim to represent AetherSX2, but do not.
The AetherSX2 Discord is also currently locked and not accepting new members, though it's unclear if this is a temporary measure.
It appears as though these frustrations with community complaints have been building for some time. In a developer update blog posted in July, Tahlreth discusses some new "micro-optimizations," before addressing complaints that the emulator cannot run on certain underpowered devices, explaining that these small optimization measures emphasize how little there is to do in terms of improving performance. They goes on to write, "Sorry, but your little Cortex-A53 is never going to cut it, so please stop saying 'AetherSX2 is unoptimized, give them time/devs need to work harder', there's never going to be a 5-10x improvement in performance in these scenarios, which is what you'd need. Instead, we'd like to point out the competition, and let you draw your own conclusions as to which implementations are 'optimized' and not."
Downloads are still available at https://www.aethersx2.com/archive/ and the Google Play Store, but no more builds will be developed in the foreseeable future, if ever.
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