Seeing the lack of an open source Playdate emulator, this seemed like a good opportunity to be the first to reverse engineer and
reimplement the platform. Most of the file formats had already been reverse engineered, but little in the way of actually loading
and running games (See Sources for reference materials).
Much of the functionality is missing, such as sprites, audio, and graphical effects, and very little is tested thoroughly, but
the groundwork is laid and Lua or native programs can be run. See Runtime.cpp and LuaRuntime.cpp for implemented API functions
and todo items. Expect many crashes.
Libraries are all embedded as submodules except for SDL2, which is required for building desktop targets.
Recursively clone the repo with: git clone --recursive https://github.com/TheLogicMaster/Cranked.
After installing dependencies, build from the project directory with the following commands (Only tested on Linux):
cmake -S . -B build
cmake --build build
This should have built the Libretro core and the standalone executable.
Loading either .pdx directories or .pdx.zip archives is supported (Only .pdx.zip for Libretro core). Run the standalone executable with the ROM path as the only command-line argument or load the Libretro core like any other. Most programs will likely crash at the moment and there is little in the way of useful debug output, so debugging from an IDE is best for now.
- Finish Sprites (Collision occasionally phases a sprite off-screen in Sprite Collision example)
- Graphical effects
- Pattern/stencil drawing
- Polygon, rounded rect drawing
- Perlin noise
- Pathfinding
- Video
- Bitmap Tables
- Audio
- Full font support
- GIF and WAV writing
- Respect all graphical context options like clip rect
- Embed system files like fonts somehow
- Finish C JSON decoding
- Finish C Lua API
- Test building on Windows/Mac
- Create a testing framework to compare console output to the official simulator (Graphics, Collisions)
- Finish font-ends (Libretro core just crashes at the moment, Desktop has no features, Android only loads a test program)
- Java library with native libs for Android app consumption
- Ensuring that all resource reference counting is done correctly
- Scoreboard support
- Investigate Catalog app (Web API already documented)
- See if emulator can play encrypted games with a dumped key or something (Maybe limiting to just decrypted games)
- System UI/software from SDK
- Investigate pre-2.0.0 binaries to handle uncompressed data
- Emulator API wrapper to hide all the messy internals, possible C compatible
- Values checks, since plenty of null/illegal API parameters will cause a native seg-fault
- Dynarmic native engine support for more portability
- GitHub Actions release builds
- USB serial functionality (As controller, dump saves, backup games?)
- Better execution model (The current approach works, but has limitations, coroutines might be elegant, avoiding recursive Lua invocation would be good)
- C++ std::function callbacks may help to support both Lua and C++ with the same interface (With Lua/Native resource references, as well)
- Fix git submodules to not get in detached head state
- Unicorn to provide Arm CPU emulation
- Custom memory allocator to allocate heap memory in a single 32-bit region for easier virtual memory mapping
- C++ template magic plus libFFI to translate calls between emulated Arm, Lua, and C++ natives, handling type marshaling and virtual memory mapping
- Auto-generated 64-bit safe equivalent Playdate API and data structures by parsing the official headers
- Lua objects represented by tables with userdata field and metatables
- Reference counting for all native resources (Higher memory usage when using many resources such as with fonts)
Requires gdb-multiarch and is run from the project directory with gdb-multiarch -x gdb_setup.
- Connect:
target remote localhost:1337 - Set symbols:
add-symbol-file pdex.elf 0x60000020(Or add-ex 'add-symbol-file "pdex.elf" 0x60000020'to gdb-multiarch command) - Use normal commands like
break,step,continue,ctrl+c, etc.
git submodule foreach git pull
- libzippp
- ImGui
- Lua54 fork
- Nlohmann Json
- Unicorn
- Libretro header
- Capstone
- Bump
- Encoded Asheville Sans 24 Light font from Playdate SDK
- https://sdk.play.date/inside-playdate
- https://sdk.play.date/inside-playdate-with-c
- https://github.com/jaames/playdate-reverse-engineering
- https://github.com/scratchminer/pd-emu
- https://github.com/ARM-software/abi-aa/blob/2982a9f3b512a5bfdc9e3fea5d3b298f9165c36b/aapcs32/aapcs32.rst
- https://www.lua.org/manual/5.4/