In case someone happens to be in the Stuttgart area (not Stuttgart, Arkansas 😂) in Germany, I attend the HügelCon Convention, where I show off the Playdate to people.

I'll be there on Saturday and Sunday. Would be nice to see someone there.

Hiho everyone,

we've just released CrankBoy 2.1.0 on Catalog.

Most notable for you might be the improved startup time. It is about 8x faster now. We tested with a 500+ games library and instead of taking 3 minutes, it now starts within 22 seconds. So for your average library of 50 games, startup should take less than 5 seconds.

Improved Game Boy Color Support. While still very experimental, more CGB games should now run. You can also set the brightness level to better map colors to the Playdate's black and white screen.

Here is a video of the new color mapping for CGB.

https://reddit.com/link/1u7l4rz/video/s6iln6s2qo7h1/player

All other new features and bug-fixes should be shown in or brand-new changelog, that should show up on start after CrankBoy has been updated to a new version and can always be accessed from the Playdate menu on the settings.

Also, if you are a fan of Beat 'em Ups, you might be happy to hear that World Heros 2 Jet received some TLC

https://preview.redd.it/xvdx7oczpo7h1.png?width=400&format=png&auto=webp&s=964ea3a163e4aed8f14617a82c614b7c7f5cca22

We are excited to announce that as of today, CrankBoy is available for purchase directly on the Playdate Catalog! While we are moving onto the official store, we want to be clear that CrankBoy is and will remain an open-source project.

Catalog-Exclusive Games

To celebrate the launch, the Catalog version will include four fantastic Game Boy titles pre-installed:

• Dashosaur DX by Sleeping Panda
• Life's Too Short GB by Pixel Ghost
• GBBBS95 by beatscribe
• Lo-Fi GB by beatscribe

>Note: These games are exclusive to the Catalog release and will not be included in the standard GitHub releases of CrankBoy.

Introducing CrankBoy Manager

Alongside the Catalog launch, we are debuting CrankBoy Manager – an easy-to-use desktop app for macOS, Windows, and Linux. This tool allows you to transfer your ROMs to your Playdate seamlessly, bypassing the hassle of booting into Data Disk Mode.

Under the Hood (v2.0.0)

• Performance: We’ve improved performance by up to 20% in certain titles and configurations.
• Experimental GBC Support: This release adds experimental Game Boy Color support. Don't get too excited just yet – only a handful of titles are currently running (e.g., Pokémon Crystal, but with some GFX glitches).
• Homebrew Hub: You can now download Game Boy homebrew directly from CrankBoy's settings.

Native Playdate Support

We’ve given even more titles some "TLC" to make them feel at home on the Playdate. For every release, we now auto-generate a list of games that have script support. You can find this list on our GitHub-Wiki.

We’re really proud of how far this project has come. If you have any questions about the Catalog release, the Manager app, or the v2.0.0 features, feel free to drop a comment below.

UPDATE

CrankBoy is now available to buy directly on device!

… and can be wishlisted on Catalog.

RUBDUBDUB