Running Racket on Macs

I wanted to provide a Macintosh executable to increase my platform coverage.

I don't own a Macintosh, so I had to  borrow one. Fairly nice, latest operating system and all that. Dr. Racket went on no problem, except for a confusing bit where I finally figured out that I was supposed to drag and drop a Dr. Racket icon to the Applications folder. Some explanatory text might have been nice...

I pulled down the source from the BitBucket distribution and loaded it into the IDE. The game played no problem. Very well, in fact!

So, I needed to compile it. I went through the standard dance. And created a .dmg file.

Apparently, a .dmg is a disk image file. The current Mac answer to .zip. Actually, it's better, since you can actually mount it as a disk.  However, when I mounted and tried to start the game, it failed immediately. No reason why, but on inspection, the sprite sheet wasn't included.

I needed to put the sprite sheet into the .dmg after the compile. This is nothing new -- I have to do the same for the Windows version in the .zip file. After some futzing around, I realized that Racket had created the dmg as read-only, so I used the Disk Utility to make a read-write version that I could put my sprite sheet directory into.

Still no joy! The icon bounces on the taskbar (or whatever it is on a Mac), then fades away.  I have no idea what's going on, or enough time on the Mac to troubleshoot it.

If you're a Mac user, and you're interested, find the dd_v110.dmg attached to this post. If you can tell me what's wrong, please do!