Nebula Retro released on PC

john26

How you may ask? By using Longford, an open source engine capable of running Gideros games on alternative platforms. Please download Nebula Retro (free) from here

https://www.dropbox.com/s/or89gadmw53p1w2/NebulaRetroSetup10.exe

Please let me know how you get on. To convert Nebula Retro to Longford I changed only 2% of the code. Note, the game plays in a window (i.e. not full screen). The user can choose either portrait or landscape mode which causes the window to be resized. The default keys are left, right, ctrl but you can redefine these from the options menu.

Have fun!

OZApps

There's an article talking about it http://howto.oz-apps.com/2014/04/porting-your-code-from-mobile-to-desktop.html

john26

Wow, thanks for writing that! You are right in saying Longford was at first written specifically for Nebula Retro but now it is quite general and can play a large number of Gideros apps. The best thing is you can port it to different operating systems and also write native code as needed.

ar2rsawseen

For some reason I can't seem to launch it on Windows 7 32-bit
Just black cmd window pops up and closes right away

Tried compatibility settings and running as administrator, does not help

john26

Thanks for testing, that's very worrying! Just to be clear, is it Nebula Retro that doesn't run or Longford? (or both!) NR should not pop up a command prompt window at all, just a single window with the game. So far I have tested on XP and Vista but not Windows 7 so I obviously need to get hold of Windows 7 and test.

ar2rsawseen

On this laptop I've tried only Nebula, let my try longford on it tonight

john26

Thanks very much. I'm now thinking the problem may be related to sound/music. Most of the test examples do not use sound so should run, then we can narrow it down.

ar2rsawseen

@john26 sorry I was not specific enough
The setup/installer of Nebula Retro is what I can't launch, only see a quick black cmd window popup and close.

Longford however installs and runs just fine

MikeHart

Is OpenAL installed on your machine?

ar2rsawseen

Most probably not

john26

The installer I use is NSIS from Nullsoft. I'm surprised it isn't working as NSIS is pretty standard and I think also used by Gideros..? I will research this. Did you install Longford using the installer (ie longford091setup.exe) or simply from the Code section is SourceForge?

I have bundled OpenAL stuff with Longford, ie. openal32.dll and wrap_oal.dll which I think are all that's needed...

ar2rsawseen

Have tried longford installer and it worked correctly

Is it the same installer?

john26

They both use the NSIS installer with almost identical .nsi scripts. Very strange... Will look into it. Thanks again