phoenixlauncher/phoenix v0.1.12-alpha1

v0.1.12 Alpha 1

on GitHub

Hey there! It's been a little while 😅

If you're on the discord, you may have seen a quick update I sent a few weeks ago about a complete rewrite of the app. If you're not on the discord, here's the TLDR:

The current codebase is very buggy and is super frustrating/difficult to work with. Because of this, I (@Shock9616) am completely rewriting the app from scratch to hopefully be easier to work with in the future.

This rewrite will eventually become release 0.1.12, but it's still a fair ways off from being feature-complete compared to v0.1.11. As of today though it is technically usable, so I've decided to upload a build so that if you want to give it a try and give me feedback, you can!

Feature-wise, this build is basically the equivalent of the very first alpha build from 3 years ago, but with a much nicer coat of paint. That being said, there are a couple new things about this release:

• This is the first release that supports the new Liquid Glass design language in macOS Tahoe! (Don't worry if you haven't updated yet though, I've tried to keep it looking good on older versions as well 🙂)

• I've also taken the opportunity to completely rework how games are launched:

  • I've moved to hard-coding the launch commands for each platform rather than forcing users to deal with terminal commands. This means that now you can just select the app/rom/etc. for your game and as long as you've selected the right platform it should just work! This is very strict right now (i.e. if your emulator isn't installed in /Applications then it won't work) but I plan to improve this in the future. I have still included the option to set your own custom command (under the "Advanced" dropdown at the bottom of the add/edit game page) so you can still use the app if you don't have the exact emulator you need in the exact location (or if you want to use a non-supported platform)

  • Another benefit of this approach is that I've been able to implement another feature that has come up a few times: being able to kill a game from Phoenix! This should work with all games except for steam games because of how Steam's custom URL scheme works. It's too bad, but I'm really glad that I've been able to get it working for everything else!

I totally get it if this build isn't in a usable state right now because of the lack of automation, but if you're interested in trying it out, I'd really appreciate feedback if you find any bugs or have suggestions! The best way to reach me is definitely our discord server, but I'll be keeping an eye on issues here on github as well!

One final note is that until the rewrite is finished and I'm ready to release v0.1.12, all code changes will be happening only in the rewrite branch on my personal fork, so that is the place to look for the most up-to-date code until the final release of v0.1.12, not here on the main repository.

I hope everyone is doing well and enjoys this release!

Happy Gaming!