Playdate

Playdate
Release Date:	April 18, 2022
Developers:	Panic Teenage Engineering
Codename:	Asheville

The Playdate is a handheld video game console by Panic.

History

The entire history of the Playdate up to the launch of the console was summarized by the sixth episode of Panic's podcast.

Preorders for Playdate opened on July 29th, and the first 20,000 units sold out within 17 minutes.

Games

The Playdate includes the first season of games for no extra cost. These season games are distributed at a rate of two games every Monday for twelve weeks starting when the individual Playdate is first powered on. The first two games come preinstalled while the rest are provided over the built in Wi-Fi.

Additional games are available through the official Catalog storefront. Games can also be sideloaded via the Playdate website or over USB.

Hardware

Specifications

• 76 x 74 x 9mm size, 86 grams in weight.
• 180MHz Cortex M7 CPU (Rev. A: STM32F746, Rev. B: STM32H7B0), 16MB of RAM.
• 4GB Flash storage (3.5GB usable). The first season of games are approximately 1GB total, leaving plenty of room for other titles.
• 2.7 inch 400 x 240 (173ppi) highly reflective monochrome (1-bit / black and white) display with no backlight. The screen is a SHARP Memory LCD, giving the screen great readability in most light levels and an extremely wide viewing angle.
• Built-in mono speaker with 3.5mm stereo headphone jack. Bluetooth audio is supported for the Stereo Dock.
• Condenser microphone with TRRS mic in.
• D-Pad & A + B buttons, Menu button, and Lock button on top, with a physical hardware crank that can be tucked in the side of the Playdate when not needed.
• 802.11bgn 2.4GHz Wi-Fi for downloading games & Bluetooth for audio capabilities.
• 740 mAh battery with 8 hour battery life & up to two week standby time.
• 3-Axis accelerometer.
• USB-C port for charging and data. A USB-C cable is included in the box.
• Color: Pantone 1235C

Screen

The screen of the Playdate is a Memory LCD manufactured by Sharp (LS027B7DH01) which offers very fast pixel switching with near zero power drain while maintaining pixels. The display is monochrome, with an OFF (black) and ON (white) state. There are no grid lines, no blurring, the screen is extremely sharp and clear. The screen is made of glass.

The screen does not have a backlight, but it is highly reflective and boasts high visibility in low light situations.

Rev. A vs Rev. B

Because of a parts shortage during the manufacturing of pre-ordered Playdate devices, two hardware revisions of the Playdate exist, Rev. A and Rev. B. They use different microcontrollers, both clocked at 180 MHz, and both paired with 16 MB of external RAM.

Version	Rev. A	Rev. B
Microcontroller	STM32F746	STM32H7B0
Core	Cortex-M7 @ 180 MHz	Cortex-M7 @ 180 MHz
L1 instruction cache	4 KB	16 KB
L1 data cache	4 KB	16 KB
Internal SRAM	320 KB	~1.4 MB
External RAM	16 MB	16 MB

Both caches are 4-way set associative with 32-byte lines (the standard Cortex-M7 L1 configuration)

There are a few differences between them, the most notable being that the Rev. B hardware's RAM is slower to access. This can lead to slightly worse performance on Rev. B devices in some performance-intensive cases like rotating or blurring an image.

However, performance differences between the two revisions is nuanced and Rev. B's RAM being "slower to access" is an oversimplification:

Community measurements actually report the opposite for sequential access: ~37 MB/s sustained writes on Rev. B against ~20 MB/s on Rev. A, while scattered reads and writes come out the other way round, favouring Rev. A

This behaviour is mostly likely explained by cache differences, not the RAM:

Rev. B is faster when the working set fits, or when access is sequential. Four times the cache means a data set of a few kilobytes can stay resident across repeated passes, and streaming reads and writes prefetch cleanly.

Rev. A is faster when access is scattered and misses are frequent. Both revisions perform worse under a poor access pattern; Rev. B is affected more strongly, so the performance gap can flip.

As some in the community have suggested: Rev. B is faster when you use the cache well, Rev. A is faster when you use it poorly.

Learn more about the Rev. A hardware by looking through the iFixit teardown.

Inputs

Standard Inputs

The Playdate has a standard directional (D) pad with up, down, left and right buttons, as well as a standard A and B side-by-side inputs. There are no shoulder buttons. the A and B button are pad printed with white letters denoting the button.

In the upper right corner of the screen, there is a circular button which activates the Playdate's system menu function. Along the top edge of the Playdate, there is a lock button. Below the menu button is an oblong mono speaker.

Crank

The crank is a rotary analog input that flips outward from the side of the Playdate. When tucked into the Playdate, the handle of the crank is obscured and out of the way of use or storage. The rotation of the crank can be read from the device as a delta (change) in rotation per frame, or as an absolute rotation angle from 0 - 359 degrees.

Accelerometer

The Playdate is also equipped with a 3-axis accelerometer. Not to be confused with a gyroscope.

Additional Sensors

The Playdate also includes a sensor on the crank handle dock to detect when the crank has been docked. This sensor can trigger game logic and has the potential for use as an additional input in some instances.

Bluetooth

Bluetooth connectivity is coming soon and will be used to connect to the Playdate Stereo Dock.

Wifi

Wifi communication offers device networking with Playdate servers for game downloads, as well as limited networking for online leaderboards in some games.

Package Contents

The Playdate comes packaged with:

• Playdate Console
• USB-C to USB-A cord
• User Guide

Playdate comes installed with the Playdate console operating system as well as:

• A few pre-installed games
• Rolling release of 24

Accessories

There are no accessories that ship with the Playdate, but Panic offers 1st party accessories which complement the device and there are other accessories created by the community. See Accessories.

Credits

Created By Panic In Cooperation with Teenage Engineering & Metric Designworks

See Playdate Credits for up to date credits

Images

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  Playdate console

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  Playdate internals

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  Playdate packaging