@bg : Indeed — I’d like to make this less painful.
Some things I can do to help:
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write a shell script to do the downloading, Makefile editing, and compiling — so all you’ll need wold be a working compiler and very basic shell skills
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point people toward emglken, which provides compiled-to-JavaScript/WebAssembly versions of many VMs; you don’t need to compile anything. Small downside: these will run slower than native VMs (but that’s probably not important at all for anything resembling a modern computer). Bigger potential downside: my trivial playing with this so far doesn’t make it obvious what I’d need to do to get games with Blurb images to show them.
The bigger tech challenge is : you’re running a server, and therefore you need some way for your friends to connect to you (you probably have firewalls and no static IP). I suggest Cloudflare Tunnel for this which is free and easy to set up. But it’s still a wall to climb.
A better design for this whole idea would be:
- integrate this idea in an existing in-browser interpreter (like Parchment) or existing terp (like Gargoyle); these already use the core tech ideas of RemGlk-to-talk-to-VM
- that already has all the VMs and the UI for playing a game
- have that send a notification to a public “chat-style” server, which pushes it to that notification to the other players
That differs from what I made yesterday, which has the on-your-laptop server actually running the VM; with this setup, the VM is run in the “main player’s” browser, and the server is just getting/dispatching the output from RemGlk.
It’s VERY unlikely anyone would ever want to host a free, public server for my current code; running a VM on your server for each game played could be resource-intensive and perhaps has security risks if the VM has bugs. With a version where the VM is inside the main-player’s browser, the server is much lighter and more likely that a simple shared server could work for lots of people.
(It would also be possible to use an existing server infrastructure, like a public free XMPP server, or an AWS sqs (which are effectively free until you have a zillion messages).
Those go beyond my itch-I’m-scratching (being able to play a game with a few known friends), but from some quick research, it looks like a few people have tinkered with these ideas to various degrees of success.