This project intentionally ships as a thin wrapper. It does not bundle the emulator, the games, or the Skylanders firmware. Users bring their own.

What you need

Hardware

  • A Windows 11 PC for the full HTPC experience (drives a real RPCS3), or an Apple Silicon Mac running macOS 14+ for a mock-driver build (no live emulator — useful for demo, family-member play, or development).
  • A large TV is the target form factor on Windows. The launcher UI is tuned for lean-back viewing from across the room.
  • A phone or tablet on the same Wi-Fi network. iOS Safari and Android Chrome are the tested targets.

Software you install yourself

  • RPCS3, the PS3 emulator, installed and working. You should be able to boot a Skylanders game in it before installing this project. RPCS3 also needs the PS3 system firmware, which you supply per RPCS3’s own setup guide. Mac users can skip RPCS3 — the macOS build only ships the mock driver, so a fake rpcs3 path is enough.
  • Your own backup of Skylanders figure firmware. This app reads .sky files dumped from physical toys you own. Dumping your own figures is out of scope for this project. The Portal Authority and dumping wiki pages cover the tools and hardware.
  • The Skylanders games themselves, installed into RPCS3. You dump those from physical discs you own, per RPCS3’s normal disc-dump flow. Supported serials: BLUS30779 (SSA), BLUS30968 (Giants), BLUS31076 (Swap Force), BLUS31442 (Trap Team), BLUS31545 (SuperChargers), BLUS31600 (Imaginators).

Why we do not bundle any of that

RPCS3 is freely distributable but changes fast and users already install it for other reasons. Re-distributing it would pin you to whatever version happened to be current when we cut a release. More importantly, game ISOs and figure firmware dumps are copyrighted material. Bundling or distributing either would make this a piracy tool rather than a legitimate accessibility wrapper. Not a road we are going down.

First-launch configuration

On first run the app does a tiny one-time config flow from the HTPC keyboard:

  1. Point it at your rpcs3.exe.
  2. Point it at the root folder of your firmware-pack backup. Expected layout is {Game}/{Element}/[Alternate types/]{Name}.sky, which matches the common community pack layouts.
  3. The app scans RPCS3’s installed-games list and surfaces whichever of the six supported Skylanders titles you have.

After that, every subsequent launch goes straight to the QR code. First-launch state is kept on disk, so you do this once per HTPC.

Steam Big Picture integration

The app is designed to be added to Steam as a non-Steam game and launched from Big Picture as a “third game” (alongside RPCS3 itself). It starts up, shows the QR on the TV, and launches RPCS3 only once a phone has picked a game. Steam-shell edge cases are tracked as a compatibility-pass concern rather than a day-one constraint — if you run without Steam, the app still works.

Distribution

Releases ship on GitHub Releases. Each release attaches two artifacts:

  • Windows: skylander-portal-controller-vX.Y.Z-windows-x86_64.zip — single skylander-portal.exe with all assets (phone SPA, fonts, figure metadata, element icons) embedded into the binary. This is the production target with the UIA driver against a real RPCS3.
  • macOS: skylander-portal-controller-vX.Y.Z-macos-arm64.tar.gz — single skylander-portal-controller binary, same embedded assets. Apple Silicon only. The macOS build ships the mock driver only — there’s no AXUIElement-based equivalent of the Windows UI Automation driver, so a Mac binary can’t talk to a real RPCS3. It’s still useful for demo, family-member play, dev iteration, and the iOS-Simulator e2e harness.

Mac install notes

tar.gz extracts to a single binary. The first time you run it, macOS Gatekeeper will refuse to launch the binary because it isn’t code-signed. Right-click the binary in Finder, choose “Open”, then click “Open” in the dialog. That records an exception so subsequent launches work normally. (Code signing + notarization is post-MVP — see the roadmap.)

The Mac binary skips the first-launch wizard entirely. On first run it writes a sensible config.json to ~/Library/Application Support/skylander-portal-controller/ (mock driver, no RPCS3 path, no firmware pack required) and goes straight to serving the QR. If you want to point it at a .sky firmware pack later, edit the firmware_pack_root field in that file and restart. SQLite db, logs, and working-copy .sky files all live under the same per-user directory.

Running from source

If you want to hack on this or run it before a formal release exists:

git clone https://github.com/chotchki/skylander-portal-controller.git
cd skylander-portal-controller
cp .env.dev.example .env.dev
# edit .env.dev to point at your RPCS3 + firmware pack
cd phone && trunk build && cd ..
cargo run

Needs: Rust toolchain with the wasm32-unknown-unknown target, trunk, Windows 11 for the UI-Automation driver. See the repo README for the full dev setup.