FreeBSD Game Launcher - Looking for testers.

[Sam (Deleted User)]

I'm looking to get permission from some popular GameMaker games' authors if I could showcase their games using a FreeBSD "launcher" I've created. Basically, you write a custom-made installation of FreeBSD which is packaged with WINE installed to play wide selection of popular GM games, and this will be in the format of a compressed *.img.xz file which can be written to a USB flash drive using free software such as Rufus or UNetbootin.

Then you may reboot your computer, go into the Bios grub menu (pressing Esc or F12 depending on your machine, will only work for Windows amd64 machines at this time) to boot from that USB into this custom Operating System. A game selection screen will be made in a software that isn't game maker because the lauincher app itself needs to be a valid FreeBSD executable as far as I'm aware. But the games it runs will be run with WINE made with GameMaker using the Windows target.

I have a proof-of-concept demo available and it was not made with game maker the game it uses is for demoing purposes only. This game was compiled natively to FreeBSD and I haven't gotten far enough to testing out GM games and installing WINE just yet. I've come to a roadblock, and I need some testers. So I asked someone from a different community to test my demo OS and they simply could not get it to boot no matter what they did and they tried it multiple times.

The file can be downloaded here:

FreeBSD-12.1-RELEASE-amd64-Launcher.img.xz

drive.google.com

If you would like to try it out please let me know how it goes for you and whether it boots successfully into a custom port of my "Key to Success" platform game. If you could also send a video of what you see on screen during boot that would be preferable so I can know everything that went wrong visually, if anything did.

I posted this in Off-Topic because I'm not using any components made with GM yet. But that will be the next step if I can verify whether this will actually work for a good amount of people reliably so enough for this idea to make a GM launcher USB disk image a reality. I'm doing this out of my own personal interest.

Anyway, there will be a follow up topic that will not be posted in the Off-Topic forum once this actually becomes relevant to GameMaker, which if it ends up working with WINE and GameMaker games, hopefully it won't be long before that will be the case. I hope it will work out. Here's a video of what you will see in the demo - well, sorta - it's been updated since and will look a little different and boot up much faster:

• Rufus download - https://rufus.ie/
• UNetbootin - https://unetbootin.github.io/

If you use Rufus note that is the only one that I actually tested and got it working with. It might not even work with UNetbootin. Don't extract the *.img.xz file and instead select it to write to usb with Rufus directly. Extracting the *.xz with programs like 7zip will corrupt the *.img.

Thanks!
Samuel