I've been using PICO-8 to prototype a potential game for the Commodore 64. It's mostly testing out the graphics and exporting the tiles, map and sprites to asm source code. In the end having the wrong palette made things too confusing for me.

So I bring you PICO-64:

It is just PICO-8 with the palette changed into that of the VIC-II, the graphics chip of the Commodore 64.

On OS X the palette that PICO-8 is using is in the binary PICO-8.app/Contents/MacOS/pico8.dat file. Just search and replace to change. I used macvim and the Tools/Convert to HEX and Convert Back.

These colors:

1d2b53 7e2553 008751 ab5236 5f574f c2c3c7 fff1e8 ff004d ffa300 ffec27 00e436 29adff 83769c ff77a8 ffccaa

Needs to be changed into these (Pepto's VIC-II palette):

ffffff 68372b 70a4b2 6f3d86 588d43 352879 b8c76f 6f4f25 433900 9a6759 444444 6c6c6c 9ad284 6c5eb5 959595

To overcome the small screen I have been using PICO-8's mouse feature to scroll around a 320x200 pixel screen. Not optimal, but still usable.

If you try this out and start hacking binary files, don't blame me if something breaks!

Nice! :D

(Loved my C64...)

A good reminder of how terrible palette were on real 1980s home computers!

I suppose if you wanted to do a lot of differnt variety of trees the C64 had you covered ;)

I have very, very fond memories of my c64, c128, and my 1200 baud modem from those days. Thats 1200 upgraded from a 300 baud modem.

If you use poke mode 1 you can mimic that wide chunky pixel.

Just add this in the _init()
poke(0x5f2c, 1)

Then you can have a strectched 64px x 128px. Very c64. Good luck on the next thing!

When seeing the title the first time, I thought PICO-8 finally had the extended limit version as PICO-64, lol.

Hah, I tried this in Windows. Makes my games a lot harder!

I think, I peed a little. Good work!

I forgot how hideous the palette is.

I've seen too many great c64 demos, I guess. How can you see something like this and still think it had a crap palette? :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXLv7UosQXs

hashtag #howdidtheyeven

If you want to try a real pico-8 game, perhaps try to use these colors instead. It is not "optimized" to convert pico-8 colors to vic colors. Instead it is a mapping between all pico-8 colors to all vic colors, so some are not good matches.

'352879 6f3d86 588d43 6f4f25 444444 6c6c6c ffffff 68372b 433900 b8c76f 9ad284 70a4b2 6c5eb5 9a6759 959595'

Hey, that's the bear from Bear Essentials right? =)

It kills the main GUI though. Lol

*"RE"