Pushed a new TortOS release about an hour ago. Nothing groundbreaking:
* LEDs show the battery: charging bar, 5 second red flash below 10%, L2+R2 flashes the level (Pixel 2)
* Tidy names on the transfer page fixes messy download names
* Muse shows dotted download names as words
* Muse plays .mp4s
* Renaming an album or book keeps its cover and place
* Down To The Wire reconnects each time it opens (Pixel 2)
I've been working on a little rhythm game. It has a few game modes and will have an online leaderboard. It's pretty simple: crank turns the lefthand scratch deck, d-pad for volume and track for the scratch deck, A starts and stops the beat, and holding A shifts the d-pad to the beat deck. B controls the fader/mouth. It clearly still needs some work in the art department.
This video is just Free Play. Game modes are Call & Response, Routine, and Freestyle Judge.
This is just a heads up if your Playdate is crashing right now. I've been getting system crashes (error e0) roughly every 21 minutes while the device just sits at the launcher. It reboots itself and does it again. No game running, so it isn't an app doing this. Almost certainly fallout from the DDoS on Panic yesterday. Manually checking for a system update crashes the OS immediately on connecting to their servers.
There's no wifi off switch, but removing your saved network in Settings may stop it, since the periodic update check then has nothing to connect to.
If you want to confirm you're seeing the same thing, plug in, open the data disk, and look at crashlog.txt in the root.
The register dumps show the same crash every time: same faulting instruction, same return address, same heap size. The device dies dereferencing 0x733e30ae, which isn't a real address at all, it's the ASCII characters s, >, 0. The CPU flags show SIMD byte-compare instructions running (the ones used for fast string scanning) while stepping a pointer through a buffer two bytes at a time.
So it looks like the updater scans a text response, runs off the end of the buffer, and builds a pointer out of the response's own characters. There's no bus fault handler to catch it, so it escalates to a full hard fault and takes the device down instead of just failing the update.
I'm sure Panic will fix it; they're a cool company :)
It's called Spindle. Here's a short demo video of it. I'm going to put it on GitHub with a 0BSD license.
EDIT: Here's the link for anyone interested. https://github.com/ericreinsmidt/spindle
I've been working on a CFW recently for a different device and decided I wanted one for myself for my EDC. It's likely not what other people want, but I wanted something that was extremely minimal, but also looked great. Under the hood it's customized MinArch with a handful of systems I like and the cores needed for the systems. I also made a very simple music app for it so I could play some music while looking at what to play, or to just listen to music.
Here was my list of must-haves:
That's all of it. This personal CFW is "AI slop" made in about two hours. But it was made with a prompt that was 1k+ words long describing the architecture, informed by a lot of programming experience and time. Some of the ideas were pulled in from other projects I am working on. The model also pulled in other CFW repos to look at, but no forking, and no copying of code. Then I fiddled with it by hand for about a day and a half to get it where I wanted it.
I had fun making a mock-up of what my Nova was going to look like when I swap out the buttons. I thought why not make it easy to check out a bunch of different looks without having to futz around in an image editor by hand. So, I made a little tool to do it. You can customize each individual piece:
I also added a share link so you mad lads and lasses can share your glorious creations with your friends or foist your abominations upon your enemies.
Give it a whirl if you like: https://leaf.game/nova-colorways
I mocked up my pre-ordered 16Bit Nova with Ice Blue buttons in Pixelmator. Came out pretty nice looking I think. Well worth the extra $5 for the buttons if it looks this good in person.
Just playing around with my retro thingamabob!
The song is >!<