Ventilastation Development Kit

Ventilastation is an open source electromechanical console for circular games, built with a large fan, a bar of LEDs and MicroPython.

Documentation: pick your path

🎮 I want to make a game → start at docs/. Install the emulator, clone the smallest game, learn Scenes/Sprites/the polar display, add graphics and sounds, and get on the menu — everything a game developer needs, no hardware required.

🔧 I want to work on vsdk itself (runtime, emulators, editors, native apps, hardware) → start at docs/internals/, and read AGENTS.md for the repo shape and working rules. ROM and wire-protocol specs, firmware building, the web emulator architecture and the hardware workbench all live there.

Ventilastation Emulator

Using the code in this repo you can develop games and apps for Ventilastation, and try them in the included emulator.

The emulator has been tested on modern Linux, macOS and Windows — setup guides are in docs/. There is also a browser-based emulator with a built-in code editor and sprite editor, served from web/ (see docs/internals/deploying-web-emulator.md).

Desktop scene-renderer comparison

The Pyglet 2 desktop emulator can compose raw sprites or VS2 scene bytes in a single OpenGL 3.3 pass instead of the usual CPU/native full-frame path. Start directly in that mode with ./vs-emu.sh --scene-renderer shader, or press F2 in the emulator to switch between CPU and GPU shader. Press F3 with a game/menu scene visible to measure both complete paths (including their texture uploads) and check their rendered RGBA pixels match. The result stays in the upper-left status line, making it easy to record the same comparison on different machines. Captured frame_rgb/frame_apa102 frames remain on the established CPU upload path because they are already final LED pixels.

Repo layout

• games/<group>/<name>/ — one folder per game: code, images, sounds, menu.png, meta.json
• system/ — the launcher and other built-in apps, shared UI assets
• apps/micropython/ventilastation/ — the SDK runtime
• apps/retro-go — submodule: native apps (Voom/Doom, console emulators)
• emulator/ — the desktop emulator host; web/ — the browser emulator + IDE
• hardware/ — rotor firmware modules, schematics, the test workbench
• tools/, tests/ — generators and the test suite (python3 tests/run_tests.py)

Build your own Ventilastation

If you have some maker experience, there are also schematics and blueprints so you can build your own Ventilastation console — see hardware/ and docs/internals/building.md for flashing firmware.