How to run Pirate Software Heartbound on a smart fridge?

Jason Thor Hall, popularly known as Pirate Software, has repeatedly made an eye-catching, bold claim about his game Heartbound. As per him, the game can run on a smart fridge. The assertion, which was often delivered during streams, became a central pillar within his defense against all coding critiques.

But what does “runs on” here truly mean? Let us break down what’s actually the claims all about and how you can run Heartbound on your smart fridge.

How to run Heartbound on smart fridge?

With reality pieced together, from technical details and demonstrations, things are far less revolutionary than what’s being suggested. The entire excitement is hinged on the visual spectacle and not the technical execution. In short, it’s all about mirror magic and less about smart fridge processing.Contrary to dramatic claims, Pirate Software Heartbound is not natively executed on the internal hardware of the smart fridge. Instead, the fridge gets used like a display, while the game runs on a separate device, quite likely a laptop or the Raspberry Pi. While not shown in the demonstration videos, the setup, as per reports includes,

Within the demonstration video that got referenced by Hall recently, the game runs on a laptop and, quite likely, on an Android virtual machine.

The laptop then streams video output to the smart fridge as display using a Raspberry Pi device, which acts like a network bridge.The smart fridge in question just functions like a remote touchscreen monitor. While it does display a game, and accepts all touch inputs—facilitated via APK, quite likely compiled for the Android compatibility, the major heavy lifting (or game engine processing) occurs on a separate laptop.The instructions of Samsung for Family Hub fridges clearly detail the exact mobile devices like laptop mirroring to fridge process. It confirms it’s the display feature and not any platform to run complex applications, including Heartbound game, independently.The Tizen OS of the fridge is a Linux-based system that only runs the approved applications from the Samsung store. It further confirms that Tizen OS limitations make it lack the capability to run any game natively.

So, while the game might appear to be running on a fridge, the smart fridge is not processing the game itself.

Pirate Software claims about Heartbound, and are they true?

During the recent live stream, reacting to Coding Jesus' critiques, Hall ensured to double down aggressively on his fridge claims. He invoked it nearly a dozen times, as part of his primary defense. He further positioned it to be irrefutable proof that the code of Heartbound, even parts of it which were written years ago in the older versions of GameMaker Studio, needed no optimization/refactoring.

As per Pirate Software assertions, "It runs on a smart fridge." He argued that to achieve 60fps on a device as such means this code was already efficient and perfect. He further stated, ‘there’s no reason for me to update the framework as it is efficient enough for running on the smart fridge at max capacity,’ dismissing all suggestions for improvement as unnecessary m@sturb@tory efforts.Hall even went ahead to showcase a demonstration video many times during the stream.

He used it as the visual evidence for bolstering his argument against code changes. His claim became a mantra and deflected specific technical criticism about performance and coding practices, shifting focus to the perceived marvel of the fridge operation.

As per reports, and truthfully, as the fridge isn’t running the game, just is displaying it, the Pirate Software argument falls flat here. The performance of the game is dependent on the host device and not on the hardware of the fridge. While mirroring Heartbound to the smart fridge is definitely a fun tech experiment, it doesn’t prove the optimization of the game. The fridge here is just a fancy monitor. It is not possible to do gaming on smart fridge.

So, yes, you can play Heartbound on a smart fridge, but only if you are okay with running the game somewhere first.