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here's what I would love: an SD card image I can flash and put in a pi that turns it into a demoscene jukebox where it just runs thru random "best of" playlists forever, maybe some minimal controls for skipping around

here's my understanding of why that won't work: most demoscene works target x86 windows specifically so ARM linux is incompatible for multiple reasons

here's a cheesy workaround I don't want to do: yt-dlp some playlists resulting in many many gigabytes of video files; this just feels wasteful and antithetical to everything the demoscene stands for

here's a potential workaround: instead of a pi, run it on an old thinkpad running linux? would wine cut the mustard on this or are demos typically more exacting than it can achieve? is it realistic to accomplish this without involving windows at all? (I know I could if we were talking about emulating C64 or amiga or whatever but I want 4k stuff too) does this exist?

@technomancy it‘d be quite annoying for a few reasons

you‘d want heuristics for what file to run (esp for sizelimited, it‘s not uncommon for a release to come with different binaries for different hardcoded resolutions), some modern releases might be a website that runs in a browser

on the other hand, larger releases might come with a window that lets you pick resolution, so there’s some interaction required. some also won’t quit until you press ESC and loop instead

finally, while the executable itself is prrrrroooobably fine these days, shader compatibility can be mixed (opengl NVIDIA only isn’t super common but things do be like that in rare cases), and perf, who knows. If it’s old enough that the thinkpad beats most things that were available at the time, sure, but if not, well, if you optimize for size, your tradeoff might be speed.

tech? no! man, see...

@halcy thanks; yeah that's a bummer that there's no straightforward way to do this

seems like if you wanted to do something like that you'd need a pre-curated list or something; just running thru an existing best-of wouldn't really be viable

@technomancy well, or you start figuring out some metadata format, heuristics, system for running stuff and failure detection, and refine it a bunch

that does sound kind of fun