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).

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.