3.X.X — Simulator crashes if console font cannot be found

SDK Bug Reports
1

As of a couple nights ago, the Simulator has been refusing to open for me — the icon in the dock will bounce, but it won’t get as far as opening a window before it force-closes.

Running macOS 26.5.2 (MacBook Air M2)
Any Playdate SDK version ≥3.0.0 seems to have the crash happen. Versions 2.7.6 and earlier seem to launch and run OK, but are obviously well out-of-date.

I’ve tried:
• holding Shift as I open the simulator to kick it to launcher
• starting my computer from a cold boot
• launching the app from the Dock, from Finder, and from Terminal
• deleting any of my own built PDX files from the SDK directories
• deleting every trace of the SDK I could find in my computer (user-level startup files, GCC toolchain, Application Support folders, xcode command line tools, etc) and re-installing from scratch

Crash logs seem to indicate that the app is attempting to access an invalid memory address? Reading the real-time Console output seems to wanna point me to process_memory_mac.cc:94 and in_range_cast.h:38, but that doesn’t help me none.

2

@ScenicRoute found the source of the crash, but I’m leaving this issue open as it’s an unresolved bug with the Simulator. It’ll refuse to open if you’ve defined a custom font for the Console that can no longer be found.

Steps to reproduce:
• Open the Simulator
• Define a custom Console Font in Playdate Simulator > Settings > General
• Close the Simulator
• Delete the font from macOS (either via Font Book or manual deletion through Library)
• Attempt to open the Simulator again

To fix, just re-install the font the Simulator is looking for — fonts deleted via Font Book go into a separate “Fonts (Removed)” folder immediately adjacent to the installed Fonts folder in the user’s Library, so you can pick the exact file up and drag it back over.

3

This was a bug in wxWidgets which will get fixed when we update to the latest version. Thanks for the report.