Is there anything like a roadmap set for the project?
There is no official roadmap for this project as of right now. To give you a little history - the current work started about 6 months ago. NMN did some 64-bit porting work on Mupen64 itself, and Hacktarux ported RiceVideo from Win32 to Linux. I decided to start development from these two by merging them into a larger project and setting up an SVN server. I ported RiceVideo to run natively as a 64-bit app and started fixing bugs.
Since then several other developers have joined the effort and contributed code. We welcome submissions of good code from anyone wanting to help. I have been thinking lately about the direction of the project as more people have been joining, and my overall vision for our work is that I want this to become one of the finest and most used emulators available for 32-bit and 64-bit Linux platforms. I really believe that Linux is becoming a great development platform, and with all the new users coming on board with popular distros like Ubuntu and Fedora, I want people to have access to an accurate N64 emulator to expand the possibilities of Linux gaming. Developers are welcome to work on whatever they are most motivated to do, but personally I see a need for improvement in the following areas:
1. Compatibility with games - fixing graphical glitches and bugs to make as many games as possible work flawlessly.
2. Bug fixing and code quality: I don't want to see any compiler warnings, GTK warnings, etc. When I first picked up this project there were quite a few obvious and annoying bugs - I've been working to get everything 'in shape' and working as smoothly as possible, and this needs to continue. We need to be very focused on quality and testing, and ensure that the code is really 'done right'.
3. Integration with distributions. We need people who can take the binary and source release packages that I post here and make distro packages (rpm, deb, ebuild) for the major Linux distributions to attract a wider audience for testing and playing.
For people looking to lend a hand, would you prefer submissions in the form of patches or by some other means?
I will accept patches here, but if someone is serious and making a contribution I would prefer that he/she send me a PM with username/password and email address, and I will set up a developer account on the SVN server. I have commit email notification setup and look over the new code to maintain quality.
Are there certain areas you'd like people to concentrate on before contributing to new features?
I am maintaining TODO files in the root directory of each sub-project - these contain known bugs which need to be fixed and feature requests from people here on the forum. With more developers coming on board, I would like to ask that developers wishing to contribute drop me a PM/email and let me know what you want to work on; I'll maintain a list and loosely coordinate so that people aren't working on the same things.