I'm a total newbie when it comes to uxn and the uxntal programming language -- and programming in general. When I tried to launch the Left app (or rom as they are called), an error popped up in the terminal and the rom crashed:
<wst> 00 28 <rst> 01 0c 17 36 00 00 Working-stack division by zero, by 3b at 0x0821. Boot: Failed to eval rom. Start: Failed
This, as noted by a member of the concatenative Discord server, has to do with an outdated emulator, and not the rom itself.
However, the provided prebuilt emulator from 100rabbits' sourcehut page available by clicking the .tar.gz link under "refs" is not up to date, so I had to build it myself.
1. The first thing you need to do is open the following website:
https://git.sr.ht/~rabbits/uxn
2. Then you have to clone this repository. This will copy all the necessary files to your computer. I am doing this on a Linux computer running the elementary operating system (OS).
Open your file manager app and open a folder, where you want the downloaded files to appear. Then right-click within that folder and choose "Open in Terminal".
3. Type in
git clone https://git.sr.ht/~rabbits/uxn
which will clone the repository to the provided folder. You may need to install git, if it is not already available. The terminal will give you instructions, if that is the case.
4. Follow the instructions listed on the sourcehut page. When running the
./build.sh
script, you need to have the terminal open inside the downloaded main folder called "uxn".
5. If a window with turquoise background and retro-style desktop appears, you have successfully built the emulator!
Now you can launch a .rom file. I have downloaded left.rom from 100rabbits' itch.io site. I then moved it to the "bin" folder (a subfolder to "uxn"), which simplifies launching by having both the emulator "uxnemu" and the roms in the same folder.
Open the terminal in this "bin" folder and type:
./uxnemu left.rom
and the rom should launch.