Out of curiosity, how many emulator bugs have you run into with TIC-80? I tried learning it, but ended up with a nasty memory corruption bug that was dependent on the exact C linker used, that could cause a wide variety of effects, and I'm worried that the entire TIC-80 codebase is that bad (as a friend I roped in to help triage evaluated)!
It's hard to try to make or learn it when the "hardware" is so very badly bugged >.<
Uh oh! I hope that bug you found doesn’t bite EMUUROM at any point.
I’ve encountered a few bugs in TIC-80, but nothing game-breaking, really. Mostly they’ve been behaviour of some editor or an API function changing in a newer version of the engine. I’ve reported the issues, and most have been accounted for.
A core problem in the development process seems to be that changes to the codebase are applied without rigorous testing. E.g., right now, a recently applied update to Lua version 5.4 has broken compatibility with some carts, and many hope it will be reverted soon… Oops!
(Naturally, this is only a problem in the master branch version. I’m perfectly content with the version of TIC-80 I’m using, 1.1!)
This one was pretty nasty, as it crashed TIC-80 itself, and took some major debugging as the effects were "random" based on the C linker and compiler! It was ultimately some really sloppy memory management (or rather, not bothering to check at all), and makes me concerned that doing 'safe' and 'sandboxed' things will still result in nasty undefined behavior!
But yeah, hopefully they either revert the lua version or come up with a way to switch lua versions on a per-cart metadata or something!
If you're curious, here's the issue report:
