magmacrunch

The terminal arcade. One command, a menu of every cabinet installed on the machine, and a way into one.

Install

pipx is the right tool here. It puts the commands on your PATH in an isolated virtualenv, so an arcade cannot collide with anything else you have installed:

pipx install magmacrunch
magmacrunch

pip install magmacrunch works too, but only reaches your PATH if you are inside an activated virtualenv or used pip install --user. Run against a system Python it will install successfully and then appear to have done nothing, which is a confusing five minutes nobody needs.

That one install brings the arcade and all three cabinets.

Playing

magmacrunch          the arcade — every cabinet on the machine
george-boole         2048 with logic gates, on its own
lava-dome            solo hold'em, on its own
moonlight-drift      the endless drifter, on its own

A game plays identically whether you start it directly or pick it from the arcade: the arcade is not a wrapper around them, it is the same host they run on.

On the arcade floor, ←→ move between cabinets, ↑↓ move a row, Enter plays and Q quits. Esc inside a game returns to the arcade, not to the shell — which is the whole reason the host exists.

                                                                     __
    .--------.---.-.-----.--------.---.-.----.----.--.--.-----.----.|  |--.
    |        |  _  |  _  |        |  _  |  __|   _|  |  |     |  __||     |
    |__|__|__|___._|___  |__|__|__|___._|____|__| |_____|__|__|____||__|__|
                   |_____|
                         EVERY CABINET ON THIS MACHINE
                                  INSERT COIN


      ┌──────────────────────────────┐  ┌──────────────────────────────┐
      │ George Boole Has Entered The │  │ Moonlight Drift              │
      │ Chat                         │  │                              │
      │                              │  │ Thread the columns. Hold to  │
      │ 2048 played with logic gates │  │ climb, release to fall.      │
      │ — merge, invert, overflow.   │  │                              │
      │                              │  │                              │
      │ ▶ ENTER_                     │  │ ▶ ENTER                      │
      └──────────────────────────────┘  └──────────────────────────────┘
                                   PAGE 1/2


                      ↑↓←→ CHOOSE    ENTER PLAY    Q QUIT
                 © 2026 magmacrunch media  ·  magmacrunch.com

It is magmacrunch.com/arcade in a shell — the same palette, the same card grid, the same blinking cursor on the card you are about to start. The one thing that could not come across is the typography: arcade.css sets Press Start 2P on nearly every string, and a terminal program does not choose its font. Pixel lettering has to be drawn, out of block glyphs, which is what the narrow title variant does — and what the web page's own title art does too, in Courier Prime rather than Press Start 2P, for the same reason.

The title art stands down as the window grows or shrinks, and always before the cabinets have to — which is what keeps the floor as low as it is:

Art is measured rather than declared, so the 119-column piece can sit at the top of the list without ever bothering someone on an ordinary terminal — it is simply never the one that fits. Adding your own is one entry in VARIANTS in banner.py and nothing else.

Choosing a cabinet starts it on the terminal the arcade is already holding. Leaving the game brings you back here. Every game is also its own command (george-boole, lava-dome, moonlight-drift) and plays identically either way — the arcade is not a wrapper around them, it is the same host they run on.

What is installed

magmacrunch --list

Prints every cabinet found, what terminal size it wants, and how it wants input. If a game you installed is not in the menu, this says why — a game that fails to load is reported rather than silently skipped.

How games get here

Games are not bundled. Each one lives in its own repo alongside its browser and Wii versions, publishes its own wheel, and declares an entry point:

[project.entry-points."magmacrunch.games"]
george-boole = "boole.arcade:GAME"

pointing at an object with info: GameInfo and start(host) -> scene. The launcher enumerates that group at startup. Installing a game makes it appear here; uninstalling makes it vanish; neither needs a release of the arcade.

Nothing in this package imports a game, so the arcade runs with none installed and tells you how to get one. The contract lives in texastoast.arcade; the two cabinets above are worked examples of it.

Cabinets

Installing magmacrunch installs all three.

Requires

Python 3.10+, and a terminal at least 36×17. Individual cabinets ask for more (around 59×22); below that their card greys out, says the size it wants, and cannot be started. The arcade's own floor is deliberately lower than any game's, so getting to the floor is never the thing that fails.

Two cards sit side by side from 70 columns and stack into one below that. More cabinets than fit are paged, not scrolled.

Truecolor helps but is not required.

Licence

PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 — see LICENSE and NOTICE. Noncommercial because the games it seats are. The engine underneath, texastoast, stays Apache-2.0.