Hi ZEP,

I'm going to make a Pico-8 stand for a retrogaming convention later this year, and I was thinking on how to organise it.
And I would really want to use Splore as the browser for existing cart, especially because it works really well in my arcade cabinet.
But as you know apart from the "local folder" tab, Splore can only be used when the computer is online and have access to your website.

As Pico-8 is, I think, using standard web services for Splore, it would be nice if the base URL could be changed in the config, instead of using fake DNS, for such a (unusual) use.
But that would also mean that the BBS protocol should be documented in a way too.

My idea for the stand is to have multiple devices connected together on a network (wired/wireless doesn't matter), so I can have access to all the computer (which will mostly be rPi and probably my CHIP) so they could share data, and as Splore is a really good browser for that, it would be really nice to have access to it.

By the way, it would be nice too to have a way to directly push a new cart from Pico-8 and not have to rely on the web browser, but that's another problem.
As my goal is really to try to make the cluster of Pico-8 to be autonomous from the internet, this functionality will allow me to let people share their production on all the pico8 available using the offline bbs, without the need of having a web browser running on the Pi.
Especially as I will want to make it run Pico-8 directly and to not have access to anything else, like if it was a real console hardware.

I think I may add more about this project on my "blog" part here with the advancement of this project as I want it to be useful for other people making event around Pico-8

Cheers

Do you need a LAN-based network Splore behavior for your project, or do you just want to make a library of games available offline? As you've noticed, Splore's folder tab works fine without a network connection. Disabling the other tabs when the network isn't available would be nice to have.

Splore is pretty aggressive about caching. I disabled my network then opened Pico-8 and Splore, and the Featured tab was not only still populated with results fetched earlier, but it had the carts. (Of course, the carts are small. I have over 1,000 carts from the BBS and they're only around 28 Mb total.) I bet you can manipulate the favourites.txt file and bbs/ cache if you want the Folder tab to have everything and the Favourites tab to have a specific selection.

If you're trying to set up a Pico-8 dev lab with everyone's carts available on the LAN and browsable by Splore, that'd be fancier. You might still get away with just filesystem manipulation, though you'll want to do some tests to see when Pico-8 loads and saves stuff. A quick check shows that Splore will reload the folder tab only when you quit and re-enter Splore (but you don't have to reboot Pico-8).

LAN Based behaviour for Splore, as I would like to share production between devices without relying on network shares and things like this, an offline BBS would be really nice for that.

I already know how splore get access to the data (that's fairly easy to find) but it would be much more nice to have access to it without using things like DNS hacks, even if it's local.

The idea is to be able to scale the thing without much configuration, just plug a node, to the network and bam, it can access to all the data.

Some part of that are way beyond Pico-8 itself, but a configurable splore base URL would be nice