Update: based on the discussion in Device boot-loop / possible launcher bug? I believe my issue was actually caused by a game called Heavy Drinker that I had recently sideloaded after its author posted on discord asking for playtesters. I posted more details in that thread, but I’m leaving this one up in case the crash logs help diagnose anything.
Original post:
I’m on MacOS Ventura 13.3.1 (a) on M1.
I accidentally used the SDK 2.0 beta 2 simulator to upload a game built for OS 2.0 onto my Playdate running OS 1.13.7. When it tried to run the game, of course it gave an error saying the game requires a newer OS version. I realized my mistake, rebuilt the game using the 1.13.7 SDK, and re-uploaded it using the 1.13.7 simulator (Device -> Upload game to device).
A few moments later, my Playdate was showing a crash screen (“Press A to continue” with no option to press B for the log) and the simulator was (IIRC) stuck on “waiting for disk” and wouldn’t let me cancel.
When I restarted the Playdate, it started going through the intro and setup process as if it was factory reset. (“Hello! Welcome to Playdate… Let’s do a little setup to get started” and so on)
I was able to use the simulator to reboot the Playdate from the setup screen back into data disk mode and recover my data folder, screenshots, and crash log, which are still intact (it looks like everything on the data disk is untouched). After ejecting it, it booted right back to the setup process and I’m afraid to continue with it since it acts like it’s going to reset everything (edit: decided to try it, went badly, see next post). When I press the reset button in the crank slot it also reboots right back to the setup process.
I think this is the crash log from when it crashed during the upload from the 1.13.7 simulator but I’m not certain:
--- crash at 2023/05/13 03:59:26---
build:9da6486e9095-1.13.7-release.153702-buildbot
r0:00000000 r1:00000000 r2:00030c94 r3: 00000000
r12:006d3000 lr:08031207 pc:08030f0c psr: 21000000
cfsr:00008200 hfsr:40000000 mmfar:43656e6f bfar: 43656e6f
rcccsr:00000000
heap allocated: 549792
Lua totalbytes=0 GCdebt=0 GCestimate=0 stacksize=0
I honestly have no idea if me using the 2.0 simulator was what caused this or if something unrelated just happened to go wrong with my Playdate at the same time.