Playdate

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Playdate console
The front of the Playdate.
Release Date: Preorders: Open
Late 2021 (Shipping)
Developers: Panic
Teenage Engineering

The Playdate is an upcoming console by Panic. Preorders are open, with consoles to ship to buyers later in 2021[1]. It will cost $179 USD[2][3], with extra for shipping and taxes.

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.[4]

Games

The Playdate includes the Season 1[2] of games for no extra cost, and a total of 24 games. They will be released at a rate of two games per week for three months[2] from when the Playdate is first powered on. These games will be provided over the built in Wi-Fi.

Further official game releases are undetermined at this time - Panic has said they want to see the response to the Season model before they decide what to do next.

Games can also be developed, shared and loaded on the Playdate's internal memory from a PC using the included USB cable with no jailbreaking or other such methods being required.

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

Hardware

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

Specifications

  • 76 x 74 x 9mm size, 86 grams in weight.
  • 180MHz Cortex M7 CPU. (STM32 F746), 16MB of RAM with 32KB of L1Cache.
  • 4GB Flash storage (3.5GB usable). The games included with Playdate 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 based on SHARP Memory technology, 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, Sleep + Menu button and Power 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[5] 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.

Accessories

The Playdate has two official accessories; the Stereo Dock and the Cover.

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 (free or paid) 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.

References