Lunacy - Lunatic Fringe on modern macOS

[Halcyon]

Hello!

I've built a macOS app that emulates enough of the After Dark engine to run the original Lunatic Fringe After Dark module file, inspired by Greg Parker's Fringe Player. As with Fringe Player, the catch is that you have to provide the Lunatic Fringe module from an install of More After Dark or After Dark Deluxe.

I've built it as universal binary for macOS 13+, but I don't have those handy for testing.

If you're interested in trying it out, I'd greatly feedback in the areas of:

* Does it work, at all? Did I botch anything with the notarization, that kind of thing?
* Framerate ok?
* Any weird bugs?
* Anything confusing in the setup?
* Any ideas to make this better?

The 1.0b1 download is available at:

Lunacy — Lunatic Fringe for modern macOS

Play Lunatic Fringe, the classic After Dark space shooter, natively on modern macOS — full screen, optional CRT shader, and a live global high-score board.

morphing.cloud

Against my better judgement, I've included a global high score list. This is probably a terrible idea that I'll remove later.

Hope you enjoy!

 

[Durosity]

Oh wow I so need to try this, I spent so many hours playing that game as a kid

 

[Forrest]

Nice - I’ll have to try this out.

 

[thecloud]

Tried it on Sequoia. Command toggles the help screens. Control and Caps Lock are both recognized and the game loads up and starts... but no other keys are recognized. The action keys shown in Lunatic Fringe itself do not function, and if I configure a custom set of keys in Lunacy's settings, those don't work either. The ship just sits there on the launch pad, unmoving, until it takes enough damage from collisions to destroy it.

 

[Halcyon]

Oof. Sorry to hear that, but thanks for giving it a shot. I'll see if I can round up something running Sequoia to reproduce it.

 

[thecloud]

What macOS did you use to build/test on? I will try testing on Tahoe to see if it works ok there.

 

[Halcyon]

So far I've tested successfully on Tahoe with an M1 MacBook and M1 MacBook Pro using either a built-in or external Apple keyboard.

 

[Halcyon]

I dug out of my closet my old Intel 13" MacBook Pro running Ventura and it seems to work there as well. I'm using the default control bindings. Custom controls _seem_ to work, but I haven't tested them extensively yet.

 

[thecloud]

Weird. I brought up Tahoe 26.5 in a VM (running on the Sequoia machine, an M4 MBP) and it has the same issue with no action keys being recognized. Everything else about the emulation appears to be flawless, except the game can't actually be played because the ship can't move or fire. There may be some fundamental issue with my machine if it works OK for everyone else.

 

[Halcyon]

Curious. Is this with the built-in MBP keyboard? Does hitting Caps Lock or Control multiple times toggle you in and out of game mode back to the title screen, or does that go dead too?

 

[adespoton]

Which keyboard are you guys testing this on? US 128 key? AZERTY? Something else?

 

[Halcyon]

That's a good question that I hadn't considered. I'm on a US MacBook Pro and US Apple Touch ID keyboard myself. I'll figure out how to test out other layouts.

 

[Halcyon]

thecloud : By any chance are you running Karabiner-Elements or any other keyboard intercept-y software?