Hi,

I was absolutely ecstatic to see we can now run pico-8 headless. Working on that tiny canvas is really exciting for me to make some twitter bots or something!

The problem is, not really surprisingly, it isn't "truly" headless. That is to say running on a headless OS results in an expected SDL error.

I was wondering if anyone had any tricks to get it running headless. For my processing twitter bot I used... xvfb? That might work in this case but it's a bit of a faff and I was wondering if anyone has had any success using a different path to get headless headless mode.

Hi @candyleader, I recently got PICO-8 working with SDL without X11 for a PiTFT, I imagine you could get a framebuffer running with no actual output and have it work in a similar fashion:

https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=30125

This might also help, I figure if you can get it running in a framebuffer over SSH, you could also get your framebuffer running in a screen session and just keep it in the background:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=20261

Hi @candyleader, I could use pico-8 in a real headless mode into a Linux docker container, using xvfb, a virtual framebuffer. This is what I did: (on a Debian based distribution)

# Install xvfb
sudo apt-get install xvfb
# Make a pico-8 build using xvfb framebuffer
xvfb-run -a --server-num=1 pico8 -export mygame.bin mygame.p8

I hope this will help

EDIT: sorry I didn't see you mentioned xvfb, but I let this message in case.

pico8 runs for me without xorg and without any special config.