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Explorer menu live

R

rodneylives

Moderator
Staff member
Loadstar OG
Well, there's a version ready for download on itch.io with the explorer menu included. It is much less than perfect, but it's a start. I'm interested i knowing how it runs for people.
 
rodneylives said:
Well, there's a version ready for download on itch.io with the explorer menu included. It is much less than perfect, but it's a start. I'm interested i knowing how it runs for people.
Click to expand...

Very happy to see the Loadstar get some attention!

I grew up in Shreveport during the time of Softdisk Publishing and have always enjoyed their diskmags for various platforms.
I have found myself browsing through the Big Blue Disks, Softstars, Loadstars, and others throughout the years.

Picked up your Loadstar collection on Itch today as the presentation via a launcher for their work is very appealing.

Here is some immediate feedback I have with the two hours I have spent with it thus far:

Launcher Fonts

The launcher fonts which appear to be dungeonfont, loadstar-presenter-smooth and tallchars are quite difficult to look at in the launcher.​
Because of this I was looking to replace them with a lighter / thinner font.
This may come down to my own degrading eyesight so I tried to replace those three fonts with my own to no avail.
I did this by simply naming the fonts I wanted to use and replacing those in Loadstar main directory.
It may not be so easy to replace them but I am not well-versed in Python so I only scanned it without modifying any code.

I did extract a fresh copy of it though the heading font still appears garbled in a way.​
​
Listed below is a screenshot of the garbled heading:​

1754081512778.png

Fullscreen Launcher

On a separate question can the launcher be made fullscreen?​
When I open the launcher it fills out 90% of the display and does not have any sizeable options.​

VICE Execution

This may be something on my end but each time I execute VICE within the launcher it spreads the emulator between my dual displays.​
I am able to move it back to one display or the other but this needs to be done each time regardless of the settings I save on exit.​

Hopefully this feedback helps and I am happy to test in any way I can if it helps.

Thank you bringing these great mags back to light!
 
The menu uses two fonts, loadstar-presenter-smooth and tallchars. They were made at fontstruct.com, you can easily make new fonts there to replace them. I should add a selection function to switch between options. The font you're asking for is thin lines, right?

loadstar-presenter-smooth is mostly a remake of the later Loadstar Presenter font in TTF form. Note that the menu software expects normal to be square, same height and width, with no below-baseline descenders, or you'll get weird graphics of the type you see. The tall font is expected to be twice as tall as wide. BTW, dungeonfont is unused, or should be anyway. Its present is a remnant of a previous project that used this menu system.

I don't know why the displays split up. I only use one display myself so it's hard to test.

The menu uses about 90% of the screen so it doesn't cover everything on screen. If I add a configuration screen a fullscreen option could maybe be added too. There's no configuration yet because I have to prioritize my efforts, but I'd like to add one.

I'd like to preserve those other disk magazines too. I'm not sure who owns the rights to them right now, I'm not certain that it's J&F Publishing. I should ask Fender if he has any ideas.
 
rodneylives said:
The menu uses two fonts, loadstar-presenter-smooth and tallchars. They were made at fontstruct.com, you can easily make new fonts there to replace them. I should add a selection function to switch between options. The font you're asking for is thin lines, right?

loadstar-presenter-smooth is mostly a remake of the later Loadstar Presenter font in TTF form. Note that the menu software expects normal to be square, same height and width, with no below-baseline descenders, or you'll get weird graphics of the type you see. The tall font is expected to be twice as tall as wide. BTW, dungeonfont is unused, or should be anyway. Its present is a remnant of a previous project that used this menu system.

I don't know why the displays split up. I only use one display myself so it's hard to test.

The menu uses about 90% of the screen so it doesn't cover everything on screen. If I add a configuration screen a fullscreen option could maybe be added too. There's no configuration yet because I have to prioritize my efforts, but I'd like to add one.

I'd like to preserve those other disk magazines too. I'm not sure who owns the rights to them right now, I'm not certain that it's J&F Publishing. I should ask Fender if he has any ideas.
Click to expand...
Thank you for the details about the types of fonts being used! That should be enough for me to get that worked out.

I very much enjoy the work done and hope to see it progress further!
 
Thanks! There's been a lot of things demanding my attention lately, but I'm trying not to set Loadstar too far back in my attentions!
 
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