scratchminer / pd-emu

A very unfinished emulator for the Panic Playdate

pd-emu - a Panic Playdate emulator

...but why?

Yes, Panic already provides a piece of software called Playdate Simulator, but...

• It's geared towards testing your own games rather than playing other people's.
• It can't run device builds of games written in C.
• It doesn't allow communication via the simulated Playdate's USB port.

I decided to try and fix this with new, open-source software.

Getting the repo

1. Run git clone --recursive https://github.com/scratchminer/pd-emu.git to clone this repo and its submodules.
2. pip install -r requirements.txt should install all the dependencies except Lupa and Lua.
3. cd lupa && make should build the forks of both Lupa and Lua without having to run setup.py.
4. Use your favorite Python package manager to install the wheel in the lupa/dist directory.

Running

You can't actually run this emulator now (since I have yet to add the Playdate API).

What you can do now is dump Playdate applications (directories with a PDX extension) from the command line.

Dumping Playdate applications/games

To dump a PDX:

• cd to the root directory of this repo
• python3 -m loaders.pdx (path to PDX) (dump location)

Decompiling the Lua files

See my fork of unluac for instructions.

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2024 scratchminer

Not affiliated with Panic at all, just a neat little side project I've been doing for a while.