Simulator reflecting the real performance of the hardware

I assume that this is a complex subject, considering how wide is the range of computers performance, but especially since most of us don’t have the physical platform yet, I find difficult to develop in the dark, not knowing if what I’m doing will eventually run on the platform.
Not having a sense of what the console can take could mean days of wasted work eventually, if I go down the wrong path.

I don’t have the expertise to tell how much work this means, or even if it’s possible to do, but I think it would be a great feature.

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It's a worthy goal, but the big obstacle is that the Playdate Simulator is just that: a simulator, not an emulator. It isn't pretending to be a Playdate device so that the same code can run on it with similar performance characteristics to a real device only faster, as console emulators do. Instead, our tools produce a second, sim-only version of your code that's natively compiled for your platform. (This is why you can't currently run a game built on Windows in the Mac sim or vice-versa.)

We could try to artificially slow down the simulator's execution, but the result wouldn't compare very well to the performance profile of the actual device, and it would likely misrepresent games that don't overtax the hardware.

To change this would require a pretty large engineering effort that's unfortunately beyond our scope for now. Maybe someday!

Yes I understand. Well hopefully we'll get the console shipped soon, and at that point the issue will be a lot less relevant. Maybe some very clever people from the community with lots of time on their hands will want to create an actual emulator at some point. It would not be unheard of :slight_smile:

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