Show HN: R-cade, a simple arcade game engine for Racket

This looks awesome! I have a brother-in-law who is 15 (gosh he&#x27;s getting so old) and who is <i>frighteningly</i> intelligent. He spends most of his free time hooking up relays to a raspberry pi to control an array of Christmas lights. I&#x27;ll forward this repo to him; I&#x27;ve been trying to get him to start experimenting with Racket. This might just be the ticket.<p>I think Racket is a wonderful language for education, and this library will certainly help a lot more kids find interest in learning Racket. When I first started programming, I wrote a lot of games with ASCII art in Perl. They were not fast, but I learned a bunch! If I had had this, I would have picked up a LISP much sooner.

Is anyone familiar with the stand-alone executable export[1] for Racket?<p>I did a Ludum Dare and browsed a submission where a child had spent a lot of time and effort making a project in PyGame, but found it hard to distribute because he didn’t have the technical know how of converting it to something like a windows `.exe` file at the time. If this helps youngsters learn and explore programming the way the Commodore 64 had a nice BASIC-&gt;6502 ramp alongside distribution via floppy&#x2F;cassette, I’d be super excited about this.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.racket-lang.org&#x2F;raco&#x2F;exe.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.racket-lang.org&#x2F;raco&#x2F;exe.html</a>

I am trying to run this and am running into some issues. I&#x27;m a newbie so please help me get going.<p>First, is this supposed to run from DrRacket? I installed the r-cade succesfully but when I run this, I get error:<p>ffi-lib: couldn&#x27;t open &quot;csfml-audio-2.dll&quot; (The specified module could not be found.; errid=126)

Very, very nice. I have been pondering getting into pico-8, and this might be a way to do something similar _and_ have fun with Racket.

This seems really cool.<p>The &quot;no external asset&quot; goal reminds me of another very cool game engine, still actively maintained, but unfortunately totally under the radar : amulet. There is even an online editor, you can check &quot;defenders of the weeping quasar&quot; it is quite impressive and totally retro : <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amulet.xyz&#x2F;editor.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amulet.xyz&#x2F;editor.html</a>

For a non-Lisper that code is so clean and readable.<p>Seems like a fun project to dig into. Busy these days, but might have to give it a go.

I pasted the &#x27;Hello, World&#x27; code after installing dependencies. It worked. Then I pasted the breakout example at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;massung&#x2F;r-cade&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;examples&#x2F;breakout.rkt" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;massung&#x2F;r-cade&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;examples&#x2F;break...</a> and ... nothing. Just seems to hang in the terminal without opening an r-cade window. How can I debug this?

I love racket. Does anyone know of a Racket to Javascript compiler. Would love to be able to create Racket powered web games with this for educational purposes

Looks awesome! I’m currently teaching Racket in my undergraduate PL course and I was just looking for something graphical to show them. I’ll try this in a week or two!

What’s the general stance on putting gifs for the Readme into the repository, potentially bloating its size?

Cool! Is there a way to dump the generated sound to wav &#x2F; mp3 file? And thanks for building ;)

at first i thought it would be a game engine built with R, which would truly be a crazy hack!