Dragon Carts

Somewhere between the bus stop and the schoolyard, the Dragon Palm changed everything.

Dragon Carts is a community cartridge library for the Dragon Palm fantasy handheld — a browser-based 8-bit console with a 128×128 screen, sixteen colours, and exactly eleven opcodes. Every game in this repo is free, open-source, and runs instantly in your browser.

▶ Play Now

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The Story So Far

1985. You've saved up six months of pocket money. The Dragon Palm arrived in a brown padded envelope — chunky, a little heavier than expected, screen the colour of a winter sky, or a British summer. The manual fits on a laminated card. Eleven instructions. Eleven.

It didn't matter. Bedroom coders everywhere filled graph-paper notebooks with pixel grids and scrawled assembly mnemonics in the margins of textbooks. Programs passed hand to hand on photocopied sheets at school. Someone ported a paddle game. Someone two streets over built a falling-blocks thing. A kid nobody knew mailed in to some fanzine a breakout clone with a note that just said "thought you might like this."

None of them knew they were building a community. They were just making things and sharing them, because that's what you do.

Dragon Carts is that spirit, bottled for right now. Make a game. Ship it. Share the source. Keep it small, keep it free, keep the chain going. Use AI if you want, that's okay too! Dare to experiment, learn a little asm along the way - maybe even make friends.

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Cartridge Collection

File	Title	Creator
adder.dgc	Adder	Agent 57951
brick-breaker.dgc	Brick Breaker	Agent 57951
dragon-scene.dgc	Dragon Scene	Agent 57951
dover-paint.dgc	Dover Paint	Agent 57951
falling-blocks.dgc	Falling Blocks	Brad
magic-screen.dgc	Magic Screen	Agent 57951
tennis.dgc	Dragon Tennis	Agent 57951

The table is alphabetical by filename. Submit yours today! PRs that break this rule will be turned away at the door.

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How to Play

1. Open Dragon Palm in any modern browser.
2. Choose a cart from the dropdown and hit INSERT.
3. That's it! The console boots and the game starts.

You can also drag any .dgc file directly onto the screen to play a cart from your own machine.

Full hardware documentation lives in the Dragon Palm repo.

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Share Your Cart

Got a game? Here's how to get it into Dragon Carts.

What You'll Need

Write your game using the Dragon Palm Developer Kit. The Hardware Guide, Assembly Reference, and Cartridge Format docs are all in that repo and cover everything from drawing pixels to reading input.

Using AI? An easy start is to feed the files dragon_palm_ai_skill.md and assembler.js to your favourite frontier model, drop in a couple of existing example .asm game source files, and write:

Read and obey the attached skill file. Recreate GAME-NAME from YYYY on the Dragon Palm. Provide the .asm and compile the .dgc using the assembler.js for me.

Steps for Sharing Your Cart

1. Fork this repo and create a branch — something like add-my-game works fine.

2. Add your files:

   • Binary → carts/my-game.dgc
   • Source → src/my-game.asm
   • Name them identically (kebab-case, descriptive — space-rocks not game1).
   • Avoid using copyrighted names!

3. Update carts.json — add your entry in alphabetical order by filename:

   { "file": "my-game.dgc", "name": "My Game" }

4. Update this README — add your row to the Cartridges table above in alphabetical order by filename:

   | `my-game.dgc` | My Game | [your-username](https://github.com/your-username) |

5. Open a pull request — title it Add: My Game. A short description of what the game is and how it's played is always appreciated.

House Rules

• One game per PR.
• Source code (.asm) is required alongside the binary. No black boxes.
• No cart may exceed 8KB or break the hardware rules — the Dragon Palm is not a negotiating machine.
• Be polite, respectful, and optionally maintain a stiff upper lip.
• By submitting you confirm your cart and source are released under the MIT licence. The graph-paper kids shared everything; so do we.

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Licence

MIT. See LICENSE.

All cartridges in this repository are individually MIT licensed by their creators. You are free to play, study, remix, and redistribute them. Credit is good manners, not a legal requirement.

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If Dragon Carts makes you smile, a ⭐ on this repo and on Dragon Palm goes a long way. It helps other bedroom coders find it.