PICO-8


hitbyambulance

hitbyambulance

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troubletype.org
I've been playing around with this, and it's fun:

http://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

PICO-8 is a fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other computer programs. When you turn it on, the machine greets you with a shell for typing in Lua commands and provides simple built-in tools for creating your own cartridges.
Click to expand...

very nice integrated 'IDE'. i really like the products that Lexaloffle has put out in the past, and this is no exception.

if i had a Pandora, i'd try out the Raspberry Pi binary.
 
Interesting. Voxatron also looks cool. I want to look through what people have done with them so far, and maybe I will get in on the fun.
 
check out the top-rated cartridges on the Lexaloffle BBS to see some of the interesting things people have pulled off with the "console's" limitations. it's really funny that the game data is actually stored in the "cartridge's" .PNG image. heh.

Voxatron is very neat indeed - really nice physics-like effects in a voxel environment. (i only didn't mention it because there's no ARM version.)
 
Gah! I love Pico8! I'm dying to get this to run on my Pandora. Has anybody tried it?

I've been trying all day to get it to run, looks like there are libraries missing, but I am starting to get out of the comfort of the kiddie pool here.

It would be fantastic if someone else could give it a shot. Pandora and Pico8 were made for each other!
 
Pandora is softfp, pico8 is most certainly compiled for hard, so it will be tricky. But the new hard support layer from notaz may help (be sure to have this compatibility layer @traylorpark ).
 
Thanks for the recommendation, that certainly helped get things moving, at least the Pandora could try to run the binaries.
So, Pico8 comes in 2 binary flavors, one compiled statically (doesn't need SDL2) and another dynamically loads libraries.

After installing the "libbcmhost-shim" package, I gave the static binary a shot. It dies with a segmentation fault. A "gdb backtrace" gave the following results.
#0 0x00064f08 in ?? ()
Cannot access memory at address 0x0
#1 0x4015151e in __default_morecore () from /lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libc.so.6
#2 0x00000002 in ?? ()
#3 0x00000002 in ?? ()
Backtrace stopped: previous frame identical to this frame (corrupt stack?)​

I'm guessing there is nothing I can do here.

Which leaves me with the dynamic binary. However, this one requires SDL2. Is it possible to get SDL 2 on the Pandora?
 
I have a quick dumb question that I will probably be able to answer myself later when I can watch videos. What kind of games are possible with the limitations? If Flappy Bird is on the low end (I saw a video of a surfing game, so close enough), what is the high end like (Tetris, Super Mario Bros, The Legends of Zelda, etc., depending on the possible complexity and size/content than can be squeezed into a cartridge)?

I am really interested, I just have a few things I need money for first, like turning my Pyra prepreorder into a preorder. I would like to try to get Voxatron while it is in alpha and comes with Pico-8 if I think I will enjoy both.
 
you can actually play the user-made games on the web and see for yourself. this link already sorts by 'top rating' so most of the impressive stuff is on the first few pages. just select a title and it'll load in the browser:

http://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?cat=7&sub=2&orderby=rating

some interesting examples: Celeste, Tower of Archeos, PICORACER-2048, Hydra, Puzzle Cave, Wizards Rule (a remake of Wizard of Wor)

i haven't seen anything sprawling in scope - it does force you to think small-scale (or make clever use of algorithms for procedurally generated maps/levels).
 
Last edited:
Oh. Yeah, he worked with them to make a special version for it. You can't copy that version. Maybe Pyra for the full one?
 
@traylorpark : not on the Pandora itself no. You need a cross-compiler configure for Hardfp or compile it from a Pyra dev-board or on another compatible machine (like an ODroid, or a RPi, but the GLES part can be different). I may try this weekend to compile SDL2 on Hardfp (on an ODroid) if I find some time (nd if don't forget to try that).
 
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