papyDeck — A little console you can open

V1 alpha — running on the bench since August 2026 papyDeck plays like an arcade machine and opens like a text editor. Every game on it is a Lua script you can read, change, and rewrite — including the ones somebody else wrote. Open the simulator ↗ See the board Read the specification 640×480at 60 Hz over HDMI 3 000sprite pixels per scanline 6Cortex-M33 cores 60 mmsquare board The game is the source There is no locked cartridge and no compiled blob. A game is a folder on the micro-SD card: a main.lua, its art, and nothing else. Change a number, save, and the game runs differently on the next frame. The virtual machine is sandboxed — no filesystem, no OS calls, no arbitrary loading — so a bad script gives you an error message with a line number instead of a dead console. The same core also runs in a browser simulator, bit for bit: what you see there is what the board shows — open it above, read a tutorial’s source, change a number and run it again. -- A sprite that follows the D-pad. That is the whole program. gfx.bundle() -- the game's art, from its folder local ship = gfx.id("game/ship") local x, y = 320, 240 function _update() local p = pad.get() -- any gamepad if p & pad.LEFT ~= 0 then x = x - 2 end if p & pad.RIGHT ~= 0 then x = x + 2 end if p & pad.UP ~= 0 then y = y - 2 end if p & pad.DOWN ~= 0 then y = y + 2 end end function _draw() gfx.sprite(ship, x, y) end See it run Two games, each recorded twice: in the browser simulator, then on the board itself over HDMI. Same Lua, same art, same engine — that is the whole point of the simulator, and the only honest way to show it is side by side. Sound is on.

No toolchain, no cross-compiler, no cable: write it, copy the folder to the card, play. Play what others wrote Games are plain folders. The console lists the published games, fetches one over Wi-Fi onto its card, and you can open the source right after — see exactly how the trick was done. Open by licence, public soon Hardware under CERN-OHL-P, firmware under MIT: the licences are chosen and their notices are already in the tree. The repositories are still private while the V1 board lands — when they open, the schematic, the board and every line of firmware are yours to read, fork and manufacture. Real arcade guts Three genlocked RP2350B, six cores, 3 000 opaque sprite-pixels per scanline measured on the board — roughly twice a Neo Geo — plus a scrolling tile background, over plain HDMI, with no tearing by construction. Where the project stands The V1 alpha board arrived on 26 August 2026 and has been on the bench since. Running today: HDMI out from the three genlocked chips, sprites and a scrolling tile background, games loaded from the micro-SD card, Bluetooth gamepads, Wi-Fi, published games downloaded straight onto the card from the console’s own menu, four-channel music and sampled effects out of the headphone jack, and the console updating its own four firmwares over the air. A browser simulator runs the same core as the board, with tutorials you can read and clone. Still open: HDMI audio, the verified leaderboard, and the V1 board itself — a voltage supervisor and a secure element are going on it. Nothing here is for sale, and there is no release date. The pages below are the honest version: measured figures, decisions with their reasons, and the parts that are still open. Firmware Software architecture, the protocol between the cores, porting notes. Hardware The board, its design decisions, the 3D model.