Hi, I wondered is there any Windows utility program to convert .bin to .pdx so I can test the .pdx on MAC Simulator while waiting for Windows Playdate Simulator ?
As I am using VNC to interact with MAC and bit slow while editing XCode though, with above suggestion, I can copy the .PDX file to a shared folder in MAC then test it using MAC Playdate Simulator instead.
If Windows Playdate Simulator takes longer time to develop, then I was thinking that BIN2PDX.EXE converter is handy to have at the moment.
The pdex.bin file you build on Windows (or any host platform for that matter) contains ARM code and requires a device to be executed. The Playdate simulator on macOS loads a macOS dynamic library pdex.dylib with x86 instructions (the Windows equivalent of a DLL) into the process space of the simulator. This is how the layout of the directory layout of the C hello world application looks like:
You would need the macOS toolchain to produce the pdex.dylib from your source code.
It sounds as if you already have access to a macOS machine + the ability to share files between your Windows machine and macOS. In that case, I would recommend to continue the edit/compile cycle on your Windows machine and then, before trying it out, do a build from the same sources on macOS before running it on the simulator over there.
You may even be able to automate these steps via ssh, rsync (for file synchronization) and OSAScript (to restart/launch the simulator) conveniently from your IDE.