GLORIOUS TRAINWRECKS DOT EXE

  • user warning: Table './glorioustrainwrecks/sessions' is marked as crashed and should be repaired query: SELECT COUNT(sid) AS count FROM sessions WHERE timestamp >= 1710603957 AND uid = 0 in /var/www/glorioustrainwrecks/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 175.
  • user warning: Table './glorioustrainwrecks/sessions' is marked as crashed and should be repaired query: SELECT DISTINCT u.uid, u.name, s.timestamp FROM users u INNER JOIN sessions s ON u.uid = s.uid WHERE s.timestamp >= 1710603957 AND s.uid > 0 ORDER BY s.timestamp DESC in /var/www/glorioustrainwrecks/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 175.
ExciteMike's picture
glorioustrainwrecks.exe.png

So the Pirate Kart launchers are pretty cool, right? Makes browsing and playing games that little bit easier. It would be cool to have a launcher like that for every event or even one launcher that works for all Glorious Trainwrecks events! (well at least the ones since the new game submission system) I thought that'd be pretty rhinoceros! So I built it!

GLORIOUS TRAINWRECKS DOT EXE

If you see any weird issues or have ideas for improvements, let me know!

UPDATE 19 Feb 2013: Now should launch DosBox so you can play 16-bit EXEs on Win 64. Also some bugs got fixed.

Comments

This is great!

This is great! Any chance that a future version could:

1) have the search bar search all categories, not just the currently selected one?
and 2) include a catch-all category for the games posted here in between specific events?

(Also, the Screenshots view-mode/tab is perpetually blank for me, though clicking on the gray rectangles does bring up the info for a game.)

Smedis2's picture

Like Pirate Kart II

This needs a jukebox that people can upload songs too. If you can make that, I will be very happy.
Anyways, nice job!

Smedis2's picture

Like Pirate Kart II

This needs a jukebox that people can upload songs too. If you can make that, I will be very happy.
Anyways, nice job!

ExciteMike's picture

yesssssssssssssssssssssssss

yesssssssssssssssssssssssss a bunch of folks on twitter are RIGHT NOW talking about a KotM-like event for music even!

You better listen to L rhyme

There was one called album in a day, where you had to make at least a 20 minute album in a day. The site's still around and the results are all over the internet archive. It's nice stuff

Zecks's picture

woah

hoah oah

Zecks's picture

it should hide events

it should hide events that have no games in them

juliette's picture

Thank youuu I love this! Is

Thank youuu I love this!

Is it just me or do you need to redownload games if you close the program? I wish they'd stay downloaded!

ExciteMike's picture

That's the bug you get a

That's the bug you get a popup about when you close it :(

I already fixed it locally though and I can make the auto-updater fix it when I find a decent combination of time, power, and internet access (I'm presently visiting family in the Land of Shitty Internet Service).

ExciteMike's picture

Unless I screwed something

Unless I screwed something up (again) it should start remembering that you downloaded them again!
(it should get the fix in an auto-update if you restart it)

juliette's picture

I think it's working now,

I think it's working now, yes!!

Danni's picture

Cross-platform support

I really like the idea behind this but more and more I'm finding myself detached from GT culture because for many years this site has assumed that everyone is using 32-bit Windows (I'm sort of guilty of this but at least I try to produce games that work under Wine).

It would be really nice to see a cross-platform version of this launcher, at least allowing access to HTML5/Flash games. For downloadable games, we would probably need an OS support classification system, perhaps even support for multiple downloads.

ExciteMike's picture

Moving Mac/Linux (are there

Moving Mac/Linux (are there others that make sense?) support up to the top of my list. Gonna take me quite a while though, I think.

Danni's picture

I can test, aid in

I can test, aid in development, whatever (Linux), but it'd help if I had access to the source.

ExciteMike's picture

I don't want to make it

I don't want to make it COMPLETELY open sauce just yet since it has some passwords I not-so-smartly put into source control, but if you give me your email address I can add you to the project on bitbucket.

breathtaking, put on main page..

WOW LOOK AT THAT , IT'S WORKING.. LOOK AT IT GO.. WOWWOWOW. MY BROWSER TOLD ME THIS FILE ISN'T REGULARLY DOWNLOADED.. AND IT WAS RIGHT..

Okay, holding down shift off, I find this invaluable and thank you for the effort.. It's almost everything I've dreamed of.

Now then, just give us the ability to sign on and comment and you'll be going beyond things. But hey, I can't ask for it all. afterall you still have to click on the node and show that you care enough to click add comment right? I mean this wasn't here before, but here you show up like an infomercial and one try and I'm already leaving testimonials, not asking for more features. Keep it up!

EDIT: And of course I wouldn't object to animated GIF support either.

Also older events were posts to the site with attachments... I wouldn't object to parsing it so it understands these oldschool events that don't necessarily have a games list but the games attached in hte comments.

spiral's picture

woah I don't know how I missed this until now

Seconding what everyone else said! This is fantastic!

Excitemike if you still read the comments

It's a little bit cluttered but I'm on the bottom here and hopefully you'll see this:

I have a lot of Windows 16 bit subsystems errors in my downloads.. Usually I get around this by dragging and dropping into my mmf2 window but it's usually the fault of too many windows open etc. It'd be cool if there was an open folder button on it. This would help a lot and of course it'd be also nice to get a quick flashforward to the node's folder since I've got like 100s of random node numbers and say if there's a text file in it. Sometimes if there's a sauce to a game in a program I use I like to be close to it too, for learning process.

Anyway it's lookin good as always. Thanks for the program.

ExciteMike's picture

Yeah that makes sense and

Yeah that makes sense and should be super easy to do.

Johny L.'s picture

I want to make a game

I want to make a game launcher too in the future, but in Multimedia Fusion 2, when i get to my 50+ game anniversary.
But the Sub-Application object does only launch .exes without the 3 icons up the window.

aaa

aaa

Linux version?

When is GLORIOUS TRAINWRECKS DOT DEB/SH/RPM?

Follow-up

I'd be glad to beta test/help port it to linux. Ever considered making it a java applet?

Blueberry Soft's picture

Have you tried it in Wine

Have you tried it in Wine (If not, I will at some point :3)?

If memory serves it's made in Adobe Air... and looking that up is not supported on Linux anymore.

Or was it Silverlight?? I get so mixed up with all these things??

Or am I confusing it with the Pirate Kart?????

Danni's picture

Wrong! It's Python +

Wrong! It's Python + wxWidgets. I was working on the Linux port of this several years ago, actually, but got distracted by school and other projects.

As a daily Linux user, I would strongly recommend against the use of deb/rpm/sh or Java applets. Nobody manually installs separately downloaded .deb or .rpm packages, and probably the second most popular Linux distro currently (Arch Linux) doesn't use either package format. And that's not to mention having to repackage so it's built against new distro releases, etc. etc.

.sh is terrible for the fact that there's no suitable icon on the file to distinguish its purpose, no standardization, the requirement that you manually add execution permissions (+x) before it will run, and usually no integration with the user's package manager, plus .sh files can do basically anything on the user's system, and Bourne shell script is unmaintainable and error-prone (it's very likely that you will make an uninstall script that accidentally deletes all the user's files).

Java applets are a bad idea because Oracle owns Java (and you know what that means), and Java really has not seen any updates to keep up with recent operating system platform changes. Not only that, but unsigned apps will be going away soon, which is something to be concerned about if you care about digital preservation at all. And I think Glorious Trainwrecks is pretty big on preservation.

For distribution on Linux, there are far, far better methods:

- Itch.io has a desktop app that looks like it's going to solve a lot of issues related to distribution on Linux. Web apps are handled well, and there are built-in players for a few common game engines. It also has a lot of attention being put into UX, which is a super super important thing.
- Once it's user-ready, Flatpak packages. At this point, we should try our hardest to make sure that third-party applications rely on distro-specifics as little as possible, and that's really why Flatpak exists in the first place. Never use .deb. Never use .rpm. Always just use Flatpak. It's basically a million times better.
- Or just do the classic method of releasing the source code (preferably some place that *isn't* Sourceforge) and with a functional build system (automake is not considered functional), and basically let people build the packages for you! In the case of Arch Linux, a build script can be submitted to the AUR for automatic building and installation.

Blueberry Soft's picture

GLORIOUS TRAINWRECKS DOT EXE

GLORIOUS TRAINWRECKS DOT EXE in the AUR would be a dream :)

(Happy to test it on Arch, Lunbuntu, and maybe something else if you get back to working on it)