crankstart: Couldn't find pdz file main.pdz

Hi,

I’ve been using Crankstart to test my Chip-8 emulator on the Playdate Simulator and it’s been a joy to use! ❤️

I was curious if my “game” would also run on my real Playdate, but every time try to I upload the package with Device > Upload the device crashes and displays the message: Couldn't find pdz file main.pdz

Curiously, I double-checked if it was also happening with the examples, with the Klondike and the Nine Lives demo, and it was indeed happening in all of the cases

The output .pdx file contains:

pdex.bin
pdex.dylib
pdxinfo

While on a Playdate game the package usually contains:

main.pdz
pdxinfo

I’m on nightly-aarch64-apple-darwin and I’m running Crank and Crankstart on a M1 Pro Macbook Pro

Do you perhaps have any suggestions? I’ve tried everything but to no avail 😔

Thank you

About this issue

Original URL
State: open
Created a year ago
Reactions: 1
Comments: 31 (19 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

Seems to be explained by https://github.com/pd-rs/crank/issues/24; modem_path defaults to /dev/cu.usbmodemPDU1_Y0005491 unless PLAYDATE_SERIAL_DEVICE is set.

There’s apparently some way to try and find this but it’s only for Linux: https://github.com/pd-rs/crank/pull/38

paulyoung on Oct 15, 2023

Do check for permission requests that are popped up behind your active window.

rtsuk on Apr 27, 2023

That is certainly the cause. It works on the simulator because the simulator uses the dylib, not the binary.

rtsuk on Apr 27, 2023

I’m curious to see what you find about the hanging, if it’s reproducible! I’d try running through strace - that’s how I figured out an issue with the commands pdutil (via PlaydateSimulator) was sending to the device. Something like strace -f -s256 -o sim.trace -- PlaydateSimulator and then try to upload the game from the simulator. Or run crank run --device through strace instead, if that’s the problem area. There will be a ton in the output file, but something may stick out about the pdutil call, or something else in that area.

My understanding is that pdz files are compiled lua, and since with crankstart we don’t use any lua, it shouldn’t be necessary; if it’s looking for pdz, my suspicion is that the pdx is missing something that tells Playdate it’s a C game. The target/GAME.pdx should have pdxinfo, pdex.bin, and pdex.so/pdex.dylib files, which yours does, so I’m not sure. FWIW, my pdxinfo only has name, version, pdxversion, and buildtime, so not much is required there. I really wish I could remember what caused this for me before, I’m sorry.

tjkirch on Apr 27, 2023

I’m not sure why there needs to be a main.pdz file. I don’t have one and it works fine for me.

rob@RoboAir ~ % ls -l /Volumes/PLAYDATE/Games/Chip8\ Playdate.pdx 
total 264
-rwxrwxrwx  1 rob  staff  27784 Apr 27 07:39 pdex.bin
-rwxrwxrwx  1 rob  staff  99092 Apr 27 07:39 pdex.dylib
-rwxrwxrwx  1 rob  staff     37 Apr 27 07:39 pdxinfo

rtsuk on Apr 27, 2023

I know this is something that can happen with a game misconfiguration or a weird command rather than a crankstart issue because I see it once in a while when I change something, but I can’t quite remember what it is at the moment… I’ll see if I can track it down.

tjkirch on Apr 27, 2023

That wasn’t the case a few months ago, but I’ll take a look tomorrow and see what I can learn.

rtsuk on Apr 27, 2023