Playdate simulator and playdate website

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1

I am running the Playdate emulator ( "PlaydateSimulator") release 2.5.0 on Debian Slink to write a game in lua.

This morning I started PlaydateSimulator and it worked great as usual until I attempted to exit the program. At that point it hung until Debian gave me the "Window is not responding" dialogue and invited me to kill it. I tried several things including a "re-install" (ok, re-extracting the tgz file) to no avail. I soon discovered that https://play.date was down. Over the course of the morning it started to come back up. When it was at least partially up (e.g. I was getting browser errors but no longer just a timeout) the PlaydateSimulator program would exit normally. When the site timed out, the program would again hang on exit. Setting "Settings->Device Metrics" to "Disabled" had no effect on this behavior. This simulator is not registered with Playdate.

This afternoon https://play.date appears to be running normally again. I am on my laptop running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, and the PlaydateSimulator program appears to be exiting normally. If I disconnect from the internet and run PlaydateSimulator, it still exits normally but prints "Soapbox: error: 6, http code: 0" on exit.
Setting Device Metrics to Disabled has no effect on this behavior either. This emulator is not registered with Playdate either.

So this leads to some questions. Why is PlaydateSimulator Phoning Home? What is it saying? What is Playdate doing with whatever data they're getting?

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2

Hey! I'm not a Panic employee, but I checked out of curiosity. I see one request going out to https://panic.com/updates/soapbox.php. This is most likely related to the one that was failing for you when play.date was down. I think it's used to check if there is a new version of the SDK.

You can see that by passing an old version number (for example: https://panic.com/updates/soapbox.php?app=Playdate%20Simulator&appver=2.4.0) the response contains info and links to update the SDK.

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Ah phew! That makes sense to me. So it's maybe possible to glean when and where I am devvin' from some logs somewhere, but not much other information. I reckon I can live with that.

Thanks for your assistance. In the current privacy and legal climate I am pretty paranoid about this stuff, even if I'm willing to give Panic the benefit of the doubt.

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4

Just to confirm, the soapbox URL is only used for updating the SDK. It will pass along a small amount of information which is not retained in any way. The information is: the current SDK version, OS platform and OS version. I hope that helps.

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It does indeed. I am most reassured.