Panic Playdate

[CaptainGreenhat]

I've been watching another modern retro style handheld from indiegogo/kick starter off and on for a while now. The handheld itself features a highres black and white screen and a hand crank (that is used to great effect in some games). Seems they have finally started releasing games and getting units into peoples hands. The main website for the platform has a free SDK that includes a simulator and there is a browser based game design tool which is a basic drag and drop game creator. Itch.io also has a ton of games/tools/programming functions available. The games on itch are in .pdz format but they need to be in .pdx for the simulator/handheld. I am still trying to figure that out as I haven't actually got a unit in my hands yet. There is also an emulator in development but it is not in a playable state and has no releases on github yet. Lastly I have no clue if there are command line hooks for the simulator or anything that launchbox can use to launch and exit games like we are used to.

I searched the forums but found no mention of this so I figured I would start a thread. If anyone has any ideas on how to emulate this either in general or using launchbox I'd love to see them and get this working. 

Edit: I did some playing around and got the games loading. It isn't a one file and run rom though. The simulator is looking for a pdx folder. You can drag and drop a game pdx folder in the open simulator to launch them though. Is there a way to make launchbox do this without using something complicated like rocket launcher?

Edited April 23, 2023 by CaptainGreenhat
Updated information

[link182]

Hi, you were able to add them

Edited March 15 by link182

[Retro_Rage]

I realized that this thread is a bit old but if anyone is curious, I got this working with kind of a workaround.

Since the simulator is looking for folders, there really isnt anything to import directly into LaunchBox. What I did was to simply create batch files for each game. just create a new file with the game name (what you want it to say in LB) and change the extension to .bat. I made all of these folders in the same folder as Playdatesimulator.exe just to make it easier and cleaner. Edit the bat file and put this inside.

PlaydateSimulator.exe "R:\arcade\Playdate\5 more minutes.pdx"

Obviously change path in quotes to your game directory. the .pdx at the end is actually the folder, not a file. You can test this after by clicking on the bat file, it should open and play perfectly.

Now you can just import all the bat files into LB like normal windows games, just make sure its not set to use an emulator but launch the file directly. Creating the bat files is a little time consuming but it does work. 

Quick edit: Make sure you don't scrape media, or you will come up with a whole bunch of weird things, The system is a mystery to LB and there really any media available at all for any game. If you want media, then you can just setup a default box etc. Also there is a Fullscreen mode in the emu but can't seem to find a switch or anything to put in the command line. I think the normal running ahk quit script should work to exit it though. If I find anything further to make this launch a bit cleaner then I will update the thread.

Edited June 17 by Retro_Rage