Something that confounded me when I first started using Pico-8 was: Where is my data being saved? For example, I wanted to have Pico-8 look for carts in my Dropbox folder so I could easily share my work between computers and with collaborators. But using this you can put your Pico-8 data wherever you want.

First of all, close Pico-8 if it's already open.

On Windows Pico-8 saves data in "%AppData%/pico-8". (To find where your %AppData% folder is located, you can select "Run" from the start menu and enter "%AppData%", and an explorer window will open there.)

On OSX it saves data in "~/Library/Application Support/pico-8".

You might fuck up, or I might have fucked up, so I recommend copying this folder and pasting it somewhere so if things go wrong you won't have lost your data, you can just copy the folder back and have things back to normal.

For convenience, let's call where you want Pico-8 to start saving its data instead "New/Path/To/pico-8". On my OSX computer, for example, my path looked like "~/Dropbox/pico-8".

On Windows open up the command prompt and enter cd "%AppData%/". This navigates the prompt to where your Pico-8 directory is. Now, to move your current data to your new folder, enter move "pico-8" "New/Path/To/pico-8".

On OSX open up the terminal end enter cd "~/Library/Application Support/", which is where your Pico-8 directory is located. To move your current data to the new location, enter mv "pico-8" "New/Path/To/pico-8".

Now that your data is where you want it to be, it's time to use a symlink to tell Pico-8 to start looking for it there. Symlinks are pretty damn handy.

On Windows enter mklink /d "pico-8" "New/Path/To/pico-8" into the command prompt.

On OSX enter ln -s "New/Path/To/pico-8" "pico-8" into the terminal.

You're all done! Now your data should be where you wanted it - your Dropbox folder, an external drive, who knows. And when you run Pico-8 again all your data should be there where you want it, and any changes you make in Pico-8 will be made to that new folder.

This is a configuration.txt option, if you want to just move your carts and cdata onto dropbox... In fact, the readme.txt specifically says it would be good to use dropbox for your carts this way...

But I suppose setting up a symlink to have even the config.txt and backups synchronized is fine too. :P More people should know how to use symlinks for things. <3

Oops

I thought I'd read the documentation pretty thoroughly and never caught the bit about config.txt - maybe there could be more emphasis on its existence and what one can do with it? That would've been helpful.

Just for the record, the windows version is:

If your pico-8 folder is at c:\pico-8

mklink /d "pico-8" "\pico-8"

Thanks for the info above, very handy

Lost an entire days worth of work to a computer crash - I'm very frugal with my backups, and have all Windows document folders routed to D drive.

But Pico8 defaults to C drive, so it's the only personal work I lost :/

If it only defaulted to the documents folder like every other program in the world, it'd be fine.

I'll have to remember to change this setting in config.txt every time I put Pico8 on a computer.

Also note - you can't just copy the URL straight from Windows Explorer. Pico-8 wants a \ slash on the end of this path, so you have to add that. Otherwise it fails silently and drops off the last folder in the path, putting the cart location one folder up.

in that file there's also a bunch of other values i really itch to tweak, like resolution

This seems to work if you're working on your own computer. If, however, you would want to work on pico-8 on a friend's computer or a public computer and have saved all the data onto a flash drive, how would you go about making the friend's/public computer recognize that you want pico-8 to look for your data on your flash drive? Won't booting it up just create a new AppData folder that you have to search out and reconfig?

Edit: Or, better yet, is there a way to configure pico-8 as soon as it's downloaded to be set up to save information in the "Documents" folder or the "Downloads" folder?

I would like a way for pico-8 to put all the info in the same folder as the exe. This would be a true portable solution, as it would not need to write anything outside of it's own folder.

Is that possible currently?

Pico-8 can be started from the command line, and has command line arguments for setting the home directory (config.txt, carts, cdata, etc.) and the "desktop" directory (screenshots and videos). You can make a simple wrapper script (Windows batch file) that starts Pico-8 with appropriate values:

pico8 -home . -desktop .

(These options are newer than the tutorial at the top of this thread.)

Thanks so much. That works great. I looked in the included documentation but totally missed the command line section. Thanks for pointing that out to me.

I wanted to load PICO-8 onto a flash drive with my carts so I could take it to other PCs/laptops as I travel. I followed the instructions above, a few more details for anyone trying it:

Copy the \PICO-8\ folder to your flash drive. Create the folders \PICO-8\Home\ and \PICO-8\Desktop\

In the root folder of the flash drive, F:\ in my case, I created a batch file pico8.bat with the following content:

\pico-8\pico8 -home /pico-8/home/ -desktop /pico-8/desktop/

Move any of your existing Carts to \PICO-8\Home\Carts\

Start up PICO-8 with pico8.bat

Works perfectly, tried it on a couple of different systems.

I use P8Coder and wanted a portable PICO-8+P8Coder solution, and based on info in this thread did the following.

• 1 Created a folder called P8
• 2 Created two folders "dt" and "home" inside P8
• 3 Copied/unzipped both PICO-8 and P8Coder to said folder
• 4 created a batchfile pico8.cmd:

start pico8.exe -home ./home/ -desktop ./dt/ %*

• 5 Edited P8Coder.ini to launch my batchfile instead of pico8.exe:

pico8=pico8.cmd

• 6 (Optional, only if you're copying over existing p8 data) Edited home\config.txt to point to relative paths:

root_path ./home/carts/
cdata_path ./home/cdata/

Now I can move the P8 folder wherever, and things Just Work, without hassle. Thanks everyone in this thread for the invaluable information!

@shinmai
when I follow your steps, I can't change into subdirectories.
I do get an error "CD failed"