So, I've been fiddling with my Picade and Emulation Station setup to get it playing PICO-8... mostly because I thought I'd configured it wrong. But just earlier, I exited ES and tried to launch PICO-8 on the command line... also to no avail. I'm not really sure what's up with that - it's in a subdir that has RWX privileges recursed to it and everything.

Using the Pi 3 B.

Also... is there a "pico8.sh" I should be looking for, somewhere? Because it isn't there. Or at least, I can't find it. I'm just in the typical ".lexaloffle/pico-8/" directory. I've tried coupling it with p8 files and the -splore modifiers too, same deal. The screen blinks like it TRIES to launch it, and then reverts immediately.

If you're using version 0.1.9b of PICO-8, then it looks like the pico8 binary that comes with the 0.1.9b zipfile isn't compiled correctly. The pico8 binary in the zipfile is a dynamically linked file, when I think it's supposed to be a statically linked file.

I've written instructions on how to set up libwiringPi in my post describing the problem with the incorrectly compiled "pico8" binary. You can try to follow those instructions, or you can wait for zep to do a new release. You can at least do the very first command ("ldd" then "grep") to see if this is also your problem.

Yep, that did the trick.

wiringPi is essential, it appears. Good to know! Some attention needs to be put into mentioning that somewhere by the download, I think.

Well this might explain my problem too. (Rpi 2)
Nearly gave up on it to just wait for another release.
Strange though thought I installed libwiringPi.
I'll have to take a look at it again and try some things.

It will be fixed when zep notices the problem with the static binary and drops a new release. It would be nice if the release notes mention what the dependencies are for the pico8_dyn dynamically linked binary though, so you could install them before trying to run pico8_dyn.

For what it's worth, the wiringPi library is available as a package on the Rasberry Pi, no need to compile as source.

To install:

sudo apt-get install wiringpi

I will update my original post.

Still having this problem two years later, installing wiringpi fixed it