GALACTIC WARS ON 64-BIT RASPBERRY PI

A few days ago a buyer wrote to me on itch.io: he had picked up Galactic Wars to play on his Raspberry Pi 4 running 64-bit Arch Linux ARM, and the executable wouldn't start. He said it was a shame that detail wasn't mentioned before buying, and he was absolutely right.

The problem went back a long way. I exported the standalone package in May 2021, with a version of PICO-8 older than 0.2.4. Back then PICO-8 only produced the 32-bit (armhf) executable for Raspberry Pi: Lexaloffle added the 64-bit exporters in 0.2.4. So the game sat there for four years with a binary that won't start on modern Pis, and I had no idea.

[ Galactic Wars, my first PICO-8 game, from 2017 ]

I've re-exported it from the original .p8 with PICO-8 0.2.7a6. Before touching anything I wanted to be sure the 2021 cartridge and the .p8 I keep were the same game, because the last thing I want is to sneak gameplay changes into what should be a purely technical update. The code is identical apart from tabs swapped for spaces, and the graphics, map, sound effects and music match byte for byte. It's the same game it always was.

For Raspberry Pi, the ZIP now ships three executables. galactic_wars_64 is the native 64-bit build (arm64/aarch64), the one to use on 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS, Arch Linux ARM or Ubuntu arm64; it needs SDL2 installed (sudo apt install libsdl2-2.0-0 on Pi OS, sudo pacman -S sdl2 on Arch). galactic_wars is still the 32-bit build for older systems, and galactic_wars_dyn is the 32-bit one that uses the system's SDL2. There's a README.txt inside explaining which is which.

[ One month of development for the 1GAM challenge, with Gradius and Galaga close at hand ]

The Mac came out of this better too: there used to be an Intel-only build and now it's universal, so it runs natively on Apple Silicon. Windows and desktop Linux are unchanged, with PICO-8's runtime updated. And the .p8 is still on itch for anyone who'd rather play it in PICO-8, Fake-08 or RetroArch.

If you already own the game there's nothing to pay: go to your itch library and download it again. And if you don't, Galactic Wars is on itch.io for two euros: a shoot 'em up made in PICO-8 in a month for the 1GAM challenge, back in 2017. Here's the full game page and the note I posted on itch with the technical detail.

Thanks to whoever took the time to report it. If he hadn't written, the bug would still be there: reports like that are what keep a nine-year-old game alive.