i think its a mixture of these things in reasonable proportions:
a] relative accessibility and learning curve
this is pretty simple - what tools are available to use? what restrictions does it impose on the user? how easy is it to get along with?
nsf, allgear, wildchip and gameboy for example all have relatively low bars of entry - especially the middle two, while pc98 has a not high but not low bar of entry - tools exist, and they're generally well regarded, but the popular offerings are incompatible due to a lack of supported players (for .vgm, at least)
.ahx is relatively rare to see purely because the software as retrokid said is Jank Af, however i feel formats like this is what makes botb... well, botb. wouldn't be the same site without seeing nsf and ahx in the same battle along with whatever the fuck zquest is. sorry i willr ead up later!
b] interest from this community
this one is also pretty simple - what interest is there from us? is it redundant with an already existing format?
liveplay was a clear case of a lot of people wanting it as an excuse to play their instruments - which is a good excuse, in my opinion. there were naysayers naturally but i think overall people were really interested in it.
to give an opposite example, i seem to remember there being a thread about minecraft block data - there wasn't that much interest, in part because it's a paid-for game still actively being developed, but also maybe the sphere of minecraft doesn't quite intersect botb that much ultimately?
c] this is the hard one - effort to maintain.
i'll give a few examples here, and what i would do.
exhibit 1:
let's say a new multichip tracker comes out - even better and faster developed than furnace.
year 1, they have hardware support for nsf as well as a ton of formats
year 5, they got like so many different combinations that would not have existed prior.
would it be fair to limit the feature set to what was available in year 1? it's official features, for what it's worth.
what i would do? the new features are fair game, because they are official. whatever got voted for back then was done in the sphere of what was available back then.
exhibit 2:
this multichip tracker dies, and is no longer developed. 10 years down the line, windows 12 releases, making this program obsolete as windows 12 does not run anything using the rundll32 API.
the only way to use the tracker, seeing as it was windows only, is to do so via an emulation layer, or via a virtual machine
this may introduce some audio bugs and unintended side effects that wouldn't be there if it wasn't for this turn of events?
what i would do? either retire the format, or heavily edit the article to detail best practices to get it running.
exhibit 3:
let's go back and say that this tracker did NOT die, but instead, went for a paid-for model instead similar to deflemask.
the latest versions are all behind a paywall, and the latest free version is no longer available.
what i would do? preserve the last free version like Kleeder has on various mirror. but ah. the creator of the tracker does Not want that. they threaten action. so retire it is, then right?
...and so on
although the botb team/users aren't directly responsible for maintaining the tools per se, they are responsible for maintaining how these tools are used here ultimately - i think a recent ish example might be like, fur in pokey being disallowed, and thus popularity for it mightve decreased a tad.
basically in short, for what makes a format good in -my- book:
- !!!!! variety of free tools available !!!!!
- easy to understand, hard to master
- sets itself apart from other formats, even if similar
- limits are on equal grounds
- good documentation from an expert within the community (or various!)
- community demand
- can be future proofed easily in case of software failure
look. i might be wrong about this, and i certainly feel like you could probably take some of these elements out and it'll still be fine, but i feel these elements ultimately contribute to a healthy popular format vs an unpopular one. i think the free tools one is paramount - a lot of young people will ultimately use battle of the bits as their way to express themselves creatively - like i did, and being able to access a wealth of knowledge on top of the tools themselves being free is important.
piracy, while an option, is illegal, risky in terms of computer viruses, cumbersome in terms of having to bypass activations. sometimes, it isn't even an option if the sound you want is on some hardware unit. i think stuff like munt and sc55 should be the absolute furthest in terms of this exact gray area as they require some ROMs we cannot supply obv.
i seem to have a penchant for writing walls of text as replies to forum posts. wahey!
