I know, I KNOW, I've fallen off the wagon again. We're gonna have to have an Infocom intervention. It's fine, I can stop any time I want to.
So the person that asked about adding a C-64 theme to the libretro core somehow nerd-sniped me again. He was like "I guess I could just build it from source until RetroArch catches up...is there a standalone version?"
And shoot, you know what? There isn't. Wasn't! Now there is.
I had been wanting to break out the graphics into something that a standalone app could use, in case people wanted all the Zorkiness but none of the RetroArchiness. But this was kinda a pain, because in all honestly, the vast majority of the libretro core would be the same code as a standalone app...the rendering, the managing of input devices, etc.
So I did something unexpected. Instead of breaking out the common code, the new SDL3 standalone app is just an extremely basic libretro host, clocking in at under 500 lines of C code.
The app provides just enough infrastructure for the core to think it's running under RetroArch. But it's not! It's actually just statically linked to a small SDL3 app that's calling retro_run() once a frame and feeding it input information.
Now that this is in place, you can just run a simple program on Windows, Linux, Mac to get the same effect without having to juggle all of RetroArch.
Or, you know, you could just play it on the web, because of course I did an Emscripten port.
Okay, on to things that aren't about MojoZork now. See you next time!