Multicart is really a nice expansion feature, to offer content beyond the 32K boundary.
However, with reload not supporting BBS-hosted carts, large games are banned from BBS.

Is that something considered in the pico roadmap to bring back multicart games to the "official" forums?

Note that supporting more than a couple of data carts will require rework of the BBS file management.

• support for upload many files at once
• support for listing cart identifiers
• support for headless export of p8.png (limited to html/bin at time of writing)
• ability to assign same id pattern to many carts (ex: vracing_0... vracing_10)

Cheers

Agreed, no multicart on the BBS is a severe bummer and puts PICO-8's home turf at a disadvantage compared to silly little upstarts like itch.io. ;)

I'd hope the hurdle to make reload() from other carts work on the BBS isn't too tall for it to happen.

(I personally thought it was already possible, or I might have been bugging @zep about it already. I have a project I was working on a year back that was expecting to take advantage of it, but then that computer died hard and I still need to recover the drive with my PICO-8 stuff on it. It's discouraging to think it won't be possible even when I get around to doing that.)

I think this looks good locally, but holistically would be quite disruptive. At once, I would love to make it easier for people to play games like Virtua Racing Demake more easily, but over time I suspect it would create a lot of gravity towards what would functionally be and feel like 282k cartridges, which I really want to steer clear of.

What /is/ possible on the BBS however (and what I believe is within the spirit of BBS's 32kcart-world), is to CSTORE cartridge data, and then load it from another BBS cart. So it is possible to make loader carts that CSTORE themselves with a set name (using the 4th parameter), and then daisy-chain back to the main cartridge or to another loader.

@Felice it might have been calling CSTORE/RELOAD from BBS carts that we talked about (it was broken at one stage), rather than RELOAD'ing directly from a BBS cart using something like RELOAD(0,0,0x4300,"#MYDAT").

@zep - I understand the rationale for that (and would require a lot of rework in cart mgt).

@zep Wait, are you saying a cart can create another cart on the BBS and then another can read back from it? Do our carts get private folders to write to, or something?

And if so, is the folder private to the cart, or to the user playing the cart?

@Felice The CSTORE'ed data is saved locally -- there's no way to store a cart to the BBS from a running cart. (Although later, it will be possible to UPLOAD a cart from commandline instead of using the web cart submitting interface).

Try:

LOAD #APPLE_WRITER
RUN
LOAD #APPLE_READER
RUN

appledat.p8 is stored locally ~/pico-8/cstore

This means that carts can clobber other cart's cstored data (no matter who the author is), but when cstoring to self a different naming scheme is used that can not be reached by other carts (based on the cart's hash content -- so it changes each time a cart is updated).