The two developers behind Azahar have announced that they’re dropping official support for Anbernic retro handhelds, following the company’s decision to promote its upcoming 3DS-esque dual screen RG DDS using AzaharPlus, an unofficial fork of the 3DS emulator.
I spoke at length with Azahar’s two lead developers, OpenSauce and PabloMK7, some time ago for a separate interview, and looking back through their answers, I realized a few were particularly relevant to what’s happening now. I’ve included some of those comments in this article, alongside a look at what prompted the decision, the differences between Azahar and AzaharPlus, and what it might mean for Anbernic owners.
Again, this is a much, much shorter ‘article’ than my usual work, so it is on my NeoCities page/experiment this time, rather than my usual site :)



I simply disagree. Developing emu for such a platform that has such a litigious host comes with experience and expectation that you have no chance of messing this up. Having the paid version would be exactly that f-up, because lawyers now gets to prove your profits and their damages. And yeah it would be kind of hypocrisy in my eyes to make such a statement in such case. However since my last message I did mentioned that this point is invalid, because it wasn’t really that situation. Azahar+ seems to be a fork of Azahar, that uses Azahar in its name for userbase stealing.
The issue shouldn’t really be on Anbernic here, but on Azahar+. Instead of addressing real issue of name similarity, they simply went blaming Anbernic, and actually being anticonsumer there. Their actions wouldn’t hurt Anbernic sales, but would hurt their consumers (hypothetically, in reality that dmg is minimal because there aren’t as many platform specific unsolvable issues as devs trying to make you think).
Again I’m against Anbernic doing this bs too. I’m not saying their are right to preinstall bs, and use it in promos. It’s just weird that Azahar went full on against Anbernic but did nothing with Azahar+. And from the Anbernic eyes: promo guy probably went on the releases page, tried Azahar - got annoyed that he cannot setup anything, got Azahar+ and got everything working there thinking it’s the same thing. Anbernic simply used what was easy to use. Azahar backlash just feels like childish outrage to me now.
I think the only wrong doing is Anbernic here, otherwise I don’t see anything wrong (maybe I overlooked something).