"Can I make a game for it?"
Yes, there'll be a short manual for building games for it, as well as a special template for Ren'Py which you can use to make games within the hardware constraints (though not all of them are enforced in that case).
Also later this month.
"Why?"
Well, why not? It's fun!
Other questions you may ask:
"Is this real?"
Yes, there'll be an open source implementation released later this month.
"Can I build it?"
This time there are no plans of providing 3d models and build instructions, but you can get very close to the specs with off-the-shelf electronics.
Now, you may think, "what exactly does that mean?" and what best to do than follow the ages-old advice of "show-don't-tell"?
You can play a very short demo visual novel for the device right here.
(Don't mind too much the fact that it was put together in about 8 hours)
A magazine poster for Rita, the Portable Digital Artbook-reader (or PDA for short). It's stylish. It's A6-sized. And it's dichromatic (this is the important part. Probably). With a device like this you can take your VNs and IFs anywhere with you and look like a more charming version of your early 2000s self. It'll be available this first of ap— well, sometime this spring. For some definitions of available. The device comes in three colours: a lovely Ajisai Pink, an elegant Ajisai Purple, and a cool Ajisai P-blue. Oh, right, translation note: "Ajisai" means "Hydrangea", in Japanese. Some important notes are scribbled at the bottom corner of the poster in very tiny fonts, but if you squint your eyes enough and stare at it for a good minute or two you can make out the sentences, "Game cards available separately. Actual console may differ from the illustration. The Flowering mermaid is not included." We imagine that the last part refers to the young mermaid dressed in purple and wearing a fashionable beret adorned with hydrangea blossoms as she holds one of these purple devices in one of her hands and attempts to scribble something with a hydrangea-tipped stylus, but we're not quite sure.
This year we've asked ourselves a very important question: what's the ideal form for a visual novel console.
And after thinking very hard, this is our answer: Rita, an e-paper-based console which gives you half of the colourwheel to work with and a refresh rate of about 2 frames per second!
Interested and would like to know more? The first dev kits should be available sometime in 2025[2]. Development updates will be given in this account[3].
[1]: not a png in bluesky.
[2]: it's happening, probably (started a week ago).
[3]: frequency of the updates is not guaranteed (life happens).
Viinyl programs start with the "% viinyl/1" header, and then include any number of declarations. Top-level declarations can introduce classes, update class and instance vtables, or introduce initialisation code that's executed directly at the booting phase. It's a pretty straightforward message-passing language otherwise.
You could program each of the 3 chips (the vii98 processor, the viiju GPU, and the voiz APU) directly in assembly, but we've got you covered with a high-level language.
Viinyl is a class-based OOPL modelled after Smalltalk with some modern niceties like delimited continuations. Here's a peek:
The pngs double as the card's art and the game's data (the encoding "steals" the last 3 bits of each RGB component --- the PNG alpha channel is not supported). Here you have the card for the demo game "The Witch's Garden is Off limits!!", which features a cute witch in a lolita getup holding oversized shears and shocked that her rabbit familiars are eating her flowers again. At the bottom of the card you have the regular contacts for the chip, where it gets inserted in the console, an indicator of the position where the card should go, and a small EEPROM flash chip under the Vii console logo.
Rather than cartridges or discs, Vii uses NFC-enabled 85x54mm cards which hold all the game data (up to 8Mbit). Once you load the game in the console by inserting it in the back pocket you can simply tap the card to load the game and start playing.
This png[1] is a game card for the emulator, btw!
Here are some very early stages captures of our prototype. The Vii has a very cozy form-factor, measuring tiny 8x8x1.5cm (ears included!), which sits just right in the palm of your hand.
But you still get a 480x480px IPS screen with a beefy 1GHz processor, 512MB RAM, and a capable GPU! (yes, that)
Just picture this: you're standing in front of the bed of white lilies near the aquarium waiting for your date when she comes running to you, apologetic. "Have you been waiting for long?" You reply nonchalantly, "Oh! No, I just got here," before you realise you have, in fact, been waiting for an hour already. But, hey, it truly does feel less of a guilty mistake when that waiting time was over in a flash. Vii is a 4-colour handheld that fits in your bag so you can catch up on your adventure games when you're too early for a date, again. Available April firs— soon?
It's special announcement day. We'll be releasing a new handheld: Vii!
Combining the convenience of makeup compacts, the power of 32-bit CPUs, and the timeless elegance of phone cards & rotary dials, you can look cute while gaming anywhere.
Give rotary dials as a video game input a try (soon)!
I'm finally picking up the work on my fantasy/DIY console, Kate, and this week I'm hoping to wrap up the application that lets you publish cartridges for it.
It started as a CLI tool, but I'm a big fan of software that actually lets you see how things will look like for end users, so:
