sgulgas / Zig-Playdate-Template

Starter code for a Playdate program written in Zig

Zig Template for Playdate

Overview

Write your Playdate game in Zig! Use this template as a starting point to write your games in Zig. The build.zig will allow you to generate a Playdate .pdx executable that will work both in the simulator and on hardware.

Things To Be Aware Of

• Not Everything Has Been Tested

  • With zig translate-c and a bunch of customization by hand, I converted the C API of the Playdate SDK to Zig. While I have battle tested a lot of the APIs in my upcoming Pictoblox game and in my port of UPWARD, there is much of the API here that has not been tested -- especially, the Sprite, JSON, Synth, and Sound Effect APIs. If something isn't working, please check against the headers in the Playdate SDK C API and make sure the APIs match. Please open a bug report if the APIs don't match.

• Not Officially Supported

  • While it works very well due to its interoperability with C, Zig is not officially supported on the Playdate. If you are having any issues, feel free to open a bug report here.

• Be Mindful Of The Stack

  • You only get 10KB of stack space. That's it. I have not tested much of Zig's std on the Playdate, but std was not designed for a stack this small. See how far you can get, but you might want to write a lightweight "toolbox" library, like I did for UPWARD. std.fmt.bufPrintZ works well, though!.

Requirements

• Either macOS, Windows, or Linux.
• Zig compiler that supports the "stage 2" self-hosted compiler. Tested on 0.11.0, but should support 0.10.1.
• Playdate SDK installed.
• Binutils:
  • GNU objcopy is required to be in your PATH on macOS, while arm-none-eabi-objcopy is required for Linux and Windows.
  • For macOS, install binutils via homebrew with brew install binutils.
  • For Linux, install gcc-arm-none-eabi in accordance with your distribution/package manager. For Ubuntu, install with sudo apt install gcc-arm-none-eabi.
  • For Windows, follow paragraph 3.1 in the Playdate SDK documentation.

Contents

• build.zig -- Prepopulated with code that will generate the Playdate .pdx executable.
• src/playdate_api_definitions.zig -- Contains all of the Playdate API code. This is 1-to-1 with Playdate's C API.
• src/playdate_hardware_main.zig -- This has Zig and ARM assembly code required to get the executable working on Playdate hardware. You shouldn't need to touch this file unless you'd like use a better implementation of __aeabi_memset.
• main.zig -- Entry point for your code! Contains example code that prints "Hello from Zig!" and an draws an example image to the screen.
• assets/ -- This folder will contain your assets and has an example image that is drawn to the screen in the example code in main.zig.

Run Example Code

1. Make sure the Playdate SDK is installed, Zig is installed and in your PATH, and all other requirements are met.
2. Make sure the Playdate Simulator is closed.
3. If you are using Zig 0.10.1, delete build.zig and rename build.0.10.1.zig to build.zig.
4. Run zig build run.
   1. If there any errors, double check PLAYDATE_SDK_PATH is correctly set and either binutils or the ARM Toolchain (depending on your OS) is properly installed and set in your PATH.
5. You should now see simulator come up and look the screenshot here.
6. Optionally, connect your Playdate to the comupter and upload to the device by going to Device -> Upload Game to Device.. in the Playdate Simulator.
   1. It should load and run on the hardware as well!

Screenshot