Recently, the retro developer Orion Soft released a "new" $15 PocketStation dev kit on itch.io, generating some excitement online among those who have always wanted to develop games for the Sony device but never knew where to start.
The dev kit is described online as "a C library and a set of tools that makes it easy to create games and demos for the cute PocketStation console from Sony", and supports pixel drawing, sprite drawing, keypad processing, and various other functions. It was published yesterday on the digital storefront and very quickly started making the rounds on social media, eventually being shared by the likes of the Necrosoft creative director Brandon Sheffield.
However, soon after it started attracting all this attention online, it soon came to light that it might not actually be as new as the developer would have you believe in their initial announcement, with the SDK seemingly being almost completely "unchanged" from a free piece of software that Orion Soft first released back in 2013.
As the BlueSky user lollie.me noted in reply to Sheffield, the SDK was previously available for free on Orion Soft's website for over a decade before being taken down in 2024, with this new version appearing to be largely the same, except for an example image being moved.
In addition to this, the .txt file for the Pocketstation library also seems to remove credit for Miko Hoshino, whose original C Library laid the foundations for the 2013 project, and Martin Korth, an individual who was previously thanked for his documentation on the PlayStation and PocketStation.
We've reached out to Orion Soft for more information on this project, and to see if they can shed some light on some of the changes outlined above.