Good news, everyone! Although my previous plans to release Exodus 1.1 last year were shelved, due to a lack of time to work on the project for much of last year, things are back on track now though, and a shiny brand new 2.0 version of Exodus will now be released 30th of April 2015, exactly 2 years after the first release. This release will contain major user interface and performance improvements, as well as a lot of back-end work on the plugin model. Most importantly, I'm now ready to take the project open source. At the same time as the release, the source repository for Exodus will go live on Bitbucket.

The extremely long delay between these releases highlights the need more than anything for this project to become open source, so that other people can contribute. With the improvements that have been made to the plugin system and overall architecture in Exodus 2.0, I'm now ready to take that step. Opening up the sourcecode on a public host like Bitbucket will make it easy for people to get involved in the development of this project, and to do their own mid-development builds. Source code contributions will be able to be submitted through pull requests, just like many other projects that are managed through these systems. Issue tracking will be public and visible through a Jira server, where users will be able to see information and receive notifications about the progress of the project. Public forums and the suggestions page will continue to give support and help direct future development.

This is a really exciting step for the Exodus project, and it's been a very long process for me to get to this point. I'm looking forward to the upcoming release, and I hope a few other people out there might like what they see, and want to get involved in adding new emulation cores or features to the platform.