Gil Tal has developed the P4 Launcher, an open-source application platform designed to bring a PC-like experience to ESP32-P4 boards with an attached touchscreen display.
The launcher boots directly into its interface, while applications (.papp files) are stored on a microSD card and loaded into PSRAM when launched. You can add, remove, and run applications without reflashing the firmware or rebooting the device by simply copying files to the microSD card.
The launcher currently works on the Guition ESP32-P4 4.3″ (800×480), the Guition JC1060P470C 7″ (1024×600), and the smaller M5Stack Tab5 (1280×720) devkits. Various input devices are supported, such as PS3 or Nintendo controllers.
The user interface is based on LVGL, the compositor scales the UI to various resolutions, the audio engine supports up to 8 streams at 4 to 192 kHz, and up to four input devices are supported for multiplayer games. P4 Launcher also supports firmware updates from the microSD card or GitHub with automatic rollback if a new version doesn’t start.
An SDK is also provided for people wanting to write their own PAPP apps, as well as two compatibility layers for existing code found in apps/common/odroid to re-implement the odroid_* API, and apps/common/v1compat to implement the older PAPP v1 service table on the SDK. The latter notably enables Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, and OpenTyrian to run with their original glue code.
You can find the source code based on the ESP-IDF v5.5.2 on GitHub. Like so many projects these days, the P4 Launcher development has been heavily assisted by Anthropic’s Claude coding assistant. Having said that, the project looks well-structured and properly documented. I’ve also asked for a demo video to show the project in action, and the video embedded below showcases the Guition 7-inch devkit running P4 Launcher (the volume is a little low).
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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