While I agree that there is not a painless procedure yet, I think it's the responsibility of the developers to include complete installation instructions, regardless of the level of pain involved.

Responsibility is a bit of a strong word given that those of us who write empeg apps (yourself included) do it on their own time and dime. I agree that it's a lot more fair to give novice users a full install process, but at the time I wrote emptriv, I was really hoping to just get input from "power users" who had already been doing some hacking. I figured anyone who really wanted emptriv installed could figure it out.

Eventually, johnmcd3 ended up writing some instructions on the basic steps (a thread called "Emptriv Install" found quite easily via a search of the programming forum for "emptriv install") and those seemed to get everyone by. I did end up helping a few people via email and this BBS, which I'm always happy to do. So I think I'm fulfilling and exceeding any "responsibility" I have.

Besides, emptriv isn't really ready for prime time, it eats way too much memory, uses a clunky interface, etc. It's fun to play, but not where I wanted it to be, so I didn't write docs. That's how I operate. If you'll notice, emphatic has a pretty good README and even an install script that works for most people (the editing of config.ini is still obviously a manual step.) When I released emphatic, I felt much better about it being a real release quality app, and as such, I wrote good docs.

Anyway I do plan on porting emptriv to use vfdlib at some point (instead of my own homegrown fonts and the GD graphics libs) but it's not at the top of my list. In the mean time, I'm happy to answer any specific questions about installation beyond what's already been documented on the forums.