Directly on the PlayDate hardware (Rev B according to the rev checker shared below) I'm getting a lot of crashes in general, but they seem a bit sporadic. One very reliable source of crashes is simply opening the settings menu. If I hard power off the playdate and leave it powered off for a bit when I power it back on I can usually get into the menu for a bit, but once the crashes start they generally are pretty much 100%.
Given that the system crashes when I open the settings menu I can't really submit a crash report (maybe I can connect over usb and trigger one or catch some logs that way?) so I sadly don't really know how to get any more info.
If I had to guess it sort of seems like an initial crash (like the one that I seem to be able to reliably trigger by hitting all 106 notes in the song "Biolum Sample-Q5S" in Otto's Galactic Groove in story mode on hard, unless that's just another symptom) leaves something in a weird state that isn't cleared out by the crash even though a full shutdown + startup restores the normal state?
If I can work out a reliable full repro I'll update this or add a reply with the details, but sadly 100%ing a specific song in a specific game is all I have so far
The initial crashes that set off this whole cycle do seem to mostly happen when I'm playing Otto's Galactic Groove, but I'm not sure if that's because it's causing the crashes or just because I've mostly been playing it (because it's my favorite game of S2 so far!).
Updated the OP, but that reports me as being Rev B. I've also tried several other things:
Booting into recovery mode. This appears to have unpacked and installed something, but now I crash 100% of the time I open the settings or catalog menus
Using the simulator to boot to the Recovery Disk which seems to contain a single file called VERSION.TXT that says 57176cb0-2.6.2-release.177516-buildbot. I assume this is the "stable version" that recovery mode above tried to install? (Possibly unsuccessfully?)
Show Device Info in the simulator doesn't show me running out of memory or anything when I trigger a crash via settings or catalog, just a spike in cpu (which I would expect).
(first spike there is crash via catalog, second is crash via settings)
Boot to Data Disk via the simulator. This gives me an error from 2023 in the errorlog.txt (so probably not relevant), the crashlog is maybe interesting though so I'll include that here in full:
Hmmm... It seems like the only way to do a factory reset is to trigger it from the settings menu, which it turns out is a little problematic when the settings menu crashes (or maybe it's not technically a crash, since it doesn't go in the crash log?) and drops you back to the home screen
I'm not entirely sure what changed (possibly letting power fully drain and then recharging?) but I was finally able to get back in the settings menu, re-update to 2.7.4, and then the crashes seemed to go away
Very unsatisfying answer but I guess something was maybe corrupted or something in my original update to 2.7.4? I wish firmware/OS updates were just generally available somewhere as tgat would have saved me a lot of time here, but it works now.
Somewhere up higher in the thread I mentioned having done the recovery-mode reset which sent me back from 2.7.4 to 57176cb0-2.6.2-release (which is where I was getting 100% crash rate when opening settings or catalog, as well as occasionally when just sitting totally idle... possibly when doing anything that triggered wifi to switch on?).
At one point when I had kinda given up on it I left it on (so occasionally crashing back into the main menu) for a day or two and the battery died. After recharging it that seemed to fix the settings crash, which then let me navigate through the settings menu to "check for update" and re-upgrade back to apply 2.7.4 that way.
I'm not totally sure that letting the battery fully drain and recharge was actually what fixed the crashes, and I'm not totally sure that the crashes were caused by wifi trying to turn on, but those are my best guess.
I shared this in the support thread as well, but for completeness once I managed to apply the 2.7.4 update I also got this crash log just after the update finished:
This reoccurred the other day btw. Not the reset back to an earlier version bit, but the crash/restart every time I open the catalog or settings menus. Currently waiting on power to fully drain again so I can see if that fixes it like last time, but this sucker stays alive for a long time in that "low power, charge me" whatever mode
I also just had a thought that it could potentially be a loose ribbon connector for the wifi somewhere? Idk how accessible that is if I were to open it up. I guess I could try shaking it and see if that helps lol
