The Playdia was Bandai's 1994 console for Japanese children: a CD player with an infrared controller, showing video of Ultraman, Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball with a few buttons to press. It had no emulator at all until recently.
We have 33 Playdia games on My Abandonware, which is most of what the console had. They are disc images of 380 to 680 MB.
The emulator, and how far it goes
PlaydiaEmu is the first Playdia emulator and the only one. It is early work: it starts discs and draws them, and it is not yet a way to play a game from beginning to end.
PlaydiaEmu, written by Aloys, comes as a program of its own and as a core for RetroArch. It is free, its source is open, and it is being worked on now, which is the reason this page exists at all — a year ago there was nothing.
A second project, Playdia Emulator, is research rather than a program to use: its notes are the reverse engineering the first one builds on.
Set your expectations from the wiki's own summary of the work: a large part of the library produces a real picture, and none of it has been played through. Treat this as looking at the console, not as owning it.
Running a disc
Open the disc image and play. No BIOS is needed, which is unusual for a CD console: the emulator stands in for the console's own program rather than loading it.
PlaydiaEmu reads a .cue with its .bin, a plain .bin or .iso, and a Redump-style zip holding either. Our downloads are zips of exactly that kind, so in most cases you point the emulator at the zip and nothing else is needed.
Save states work. Battery saves and cheats do not.
Japanese children's television
Every Playdia disc is Japanese, and nearly every one is a licensed cartoon. What you are running is closer to an interactive video than to a game.
Our shelf is Ultraman, Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball Z, Hello Kitty and Gamera, plus a curious run of five discs of voice actresses talking to the viewer. Several are lessons: the alphabet, hiragana, numbers.
I need help!
We do not provide support for running abandonware games. The Playdia is a recent project and the people working on it are few.
The Emulation General Wiki follows both emulators and says plainly how far each has got. The libretro documentation covers the core's settings.
Checked in October 2026 against each emulator's own documentation and, where it exists, its source code. Game counts and file sizes come from our own catalogue. These guides were drafted with the help of an AI assistant and checked by hand before publishing. If something here is out of date, tell us.