# I Ordered a Playdate Console

2025-09-10 - [54] 6:24

So after debating it with myself for a while now, I decided to just go ahead and purchase a Playdate console by Panic, that cute yellow handheld console with the hand-crank.

Playdate console website [HTTPS]

## Internal Debate

There were multiple pros and cons I thought about alot before deciding finally to pick the console up (I don't have the console at the time of writing this, but I did just get a shipping email, so they set up a shipping label by this point at least). Those pros and cons are:

### Pros

- The community of developers tend to lean in the "strange" (in a good way) and creative direction, which is what I want in video games
- The console is SOOOOO cute and charming
- I can develop games for it myself
- Sideloading games is not only possible, but also supported (if not also encouraged)

### Cons

- Requires creating an online account (I REALLY didn't want to make another online account, and doing so hurt me spiritually...)
- The OS is locked down
- $229 USD before taxes, shipping, and tariffs (the tariffs thanks to the current US administration...) is pretty steep of a cost (I picked up the "Cover Bundle", which cuts $14 USD off of the cover, but the total cost ended up being just shy of $290 USD)
- The device "phones home" (but to be fair, so do current Nintendo, Playstation, and XBox devices)
- Panic has the ability to unregister devices "over the air" and send updates "over the air", so it is absolutely possible for them to brick a device if they so choose (again, to be fair, this applies to Nintendo, Playstation, and XBox devices as well)

While I don't think Panic will brick my device over the air, I am not a fan of that being a possibility.

## Game/App Development

I intend to make a graphical version of Syzygy for the Playdate which will show the location of the Sun and the Moon along with the Moon phase based on the time on the console and a user input Latitude and Longitude. Because there is a built-in accelerometer in the console, I might add some sort gyroscopic feature where the user can locate the Sun or Moon in real life by moving the console around. Unfortunately because there is no light for the screen of the console, that might be a bit difficult at night time.

Another program I intend to make is a Julian/Gregorian calendar like I did for CALENDAR_DOT_EXE for the NES.

## Games/Apps I'm Excited to Play With

Something that may interest the Geminispace and Gopherspace communities is the Hopper Gopher/Gemini/Finger browser. I played around with it a bit on the Playdate simulator and it works great! There isn't support for a lot of unicode though, which is a shame, but my content is mostly ASCII anyways, so it's not that big of an issue.

Hopper itch.io page [HTTPS]

I am also excited to play Hundred Rabbits' "Oquonie" on the playdate. They had finished up a 1-bit color port of the game back sometime around February of this year. I made a bit of progress in the game already, but I am going to hold off on playing it now until I have the Playdate and sideload the game into it. It's great to see UXN programs should work on the console with the Varvara port to Playdate.

Oquonie itch.io page [HTTPS]

The thing that excites me the most is how little I know about a lot of what is available for the Playdate and how I'll be able to discover these things for my first time!

## Note on Online Account Security

I had noticed that there is no 2 factor setting available for Playdate online accounts. There is some sort of PIN setting to prevent others from purchasing games/apps on your Playdate though, so that is better than nothing. As much as I don't want to have to save more online account information, I do think it would be in Playdate customers' best interest if Panic added TOTP (Time based One Time Password) support to accounts, at least when logging into https://play.date itself on a web browser. This unfortunately would cause more headache to the Playdate team in the case of someone setting up 2 factor authentication and then losing it, but some of that gets mitigated if the TOTP feature isn't advertised to begin with.

The TOTP protocol isn't difficult to implement, and as there are already user accounts that store game data and payment data, it would certainly be possible to add a shared TOTP secret seed to the database.

I might be thinking too much about this though.

## Contact/Reply

If you would like to reply to this post, feel free to send me an email.

Email: vi@vigrey.com [Email]
PGP Public Key [515F AD67 F931 0A2B 9B93 CE19 814F ECB1 A398 63CE]