mircade-snap

mircade, miral-kiosk and snapcraft.io

mircade is a proof-of-concept game launcher for use with miral-kiosk. It looks for installed games, works out if they use a toolkit supported by Mir and allows the user to play them.

miral-kiosk is a proof-of-concept Mir server for kiosk style use. It has very basic window management designed to support a single fullscreen application.

snapcraft.io is a packaging system that allows you to package applications (as “snaps”) in a way that runs on multiple linux distributions. You first need to have snapcraft installed on your target system (I used a dragonboard with Ubuntu Core as described in my previous article).

The mircade snap takes mircade and a few open games from the Ubuntu archive to create an “arcade style” snap for playing these games.

Setting up the Mir snaps

The mircade snap is based on the “Mir Kiosk Snaps” described here.

The first couple of installs are the same as for the kiosk apps:

$ snap install mir-libs --channel edge
$ snap install mir-kiosk --channel edge

And the difference is installing the mircade-snap:

$ snap install mircade --devmode --channel=edge

Using mircade on the dragonboard

At this point you should see an orange screen with the name of a game. You can change the game by touching/clicking the top or bottom of the screen (or using the arrow keys). Start the current game by touching/clicking the middle of the screen or pressing enter.