v0.4.0

Release v0.4.0 of the ASCOM Alpaca Simulators project! Primary improvements include changes to several simulated devices and improved testing for Alpaca calls.

Note

If you have installed ASCOM Platform 7 you will already have this release, which is primarily for Platform 6 on Windows and all other operating systems.

Simulation changes

1. Support for Platform 7 interface changes
2. Several bug and function enhancements

General Improvements

1. Optional COM support on Windows systems
2. Updated to .Net 8
3. Updated to latest versions of the ASCOM Libraries
4. Updated to Type 2 AppImages for Linux

The binaries can be started directly or from the command line. Either way they will display a terminal for output / testing. These releases are simple zip / tar.xz files containing the output. For each the main binary is named ascom.alpaca.simulators.

Each OS dependent package was built as a Self Contained (does not require .Net 8.0 to be installed) and Trimmed (size reduced by removing unused platform code). All targets are Ready to Run AOT Compiled (whatever code can be fully compiled was).

This release includes Windows (x86 and amd64), Linux (amd64, armhf, and aarch64) and macOS amd64 (Intel or Rosetta 2) binaries.

The zip that ends with .Net 8.0 is a release build that is much smaller but it requires .Net 8.0 to be installed on the system. It can be unzipped and started by calling "dotnet .\ascom.alpaca.simulators.dll" or by running the exe on Windows.

Linux builds also offer experimental AppImage packages, which have AppImage in the file name.