Playdate

Playdate console
Release Date:	July 2021 (Preorders) ???? 2021 (Shipping)
Developers:	Panic

The Playdate is an upcoming console by Panic. Preorders will open in July of 2021, with consoles to ship to buyers an indeterminate amount of time after.

Games

Buying a Playdate entitles you to the first Season of games, with 24 games being included, at a release rate of two games per week for three months. These games will be provided over the built in Wi-Fi. Further game releases are undetermined.

Games can also be developed, shared and loaded on the Playdate from a PC using the included USB cable.

All Playdate games to date are singleplayer, but Panic plan on adding multiplayer functionality to the Playdate SDK some time down the road.

Development

Every Playdate console serves as a development system; as long as you have a PC with a copy of the Playdate SDK, you'll be able to use it to develop, test and play Playdate games. These games can then be shared across the internet and played by other players.

The Playdate SDK supports both the Lua and C programming languages, with a series of Lua-specific Playdate libraries included with the SDK in order to help development in that language. It also has a simulator for the Playdate that can be used to test games.

There will also be a secondary development system, Pulp, which allows for simple, tile based games to be developed for the Playdate entirely via a web browser.

Specifications

• 76 x 74 x 9mm size.
• 180MHz Cortex M7 CPU.
• 16MB of RAM with 32KB of L1Cache.
• 4GB Flash storage (3.5GB usable).
• 400 x 240 monochrome display.
• Mono speaker with stereo headphone jack.
• Microphone.
• D-Pad & A + B buttons.
• Physical hardware crank.
• 802.11bgn 2.4GHz Wi-Fi & Bluetooth.
• 8 hour battery life, two week standby time.
• 3-Axis accelerometer.
• USB-C for charging and data (USB-C to USB-A cable included in box)