Updates

It’s been a while since the last update. There is at least one bug that’s been fixed but I haven’t pushed out yet (Dungeon having the wrong filename in the menu). I’ve not pushed it out yet because the process is rather a hassle. While I have build scripts that take care of much of it part of the process is copying a big zip file to a Windows 10 virtual machine in order to construct and finish the second half of the push. It’s all doable, it just takes a fair bit of effort.

There is still that problem with the Linux version: it relies on a system-supplied version of VICE, and possibly having to obtain the C64 ROMs yourself. Now that “Commodore” (see below) is a going concern again, distributing that 40-year-old ~9K of ROM (Kernal + BASIC + chargen), however silly it might seem, may become an issue again.

(The scare quotes around “Commodore” are because, as when Infogrammes bought the trademarks for the old Atari, or more recently when James Nagel bought the trademarks to Compute! and Compute’s Gazette, there is little continuity between these new versions of those companies and the originals. I don’t mean to imply that this is good or bad; in each case, it’s really both. But they are different, in a way that I wish more tech media people would emphasize, or even mention. At least in our case, Fender Tucker and Judi Mangham, rights holders to Loadstar, are still around and have given this project their blessing.)

The other half of our issue with Linux, that of having to rely on system-provided VICE (which in turn means Loadstar Explorer cannot be run directly from the itch.io app due to sandboxing) can be remedied possibly by using a version of VICE packaged in an AppImage. But alas, I don’t know how to make one, and it looks like it isn’t an utterly simple process to do it.

Is anyone reading this cognizant of these kinds of issues, and have ideas for how to solve/fix/simplify them? My ears are open!