What I'm thinking is a true crossover of the greatest DIY gaming projects. Have you ever heard of the Pinbox 3000? It's a kit that you customize to create your own compact pinball machine. It's made from cardboard and is completely analog. Last time I checked, the creators did have some videos about possible projects for rigging up an electronic score system.

What I was thinking of is maybe using a Pi to run PICO-8 underneath the playfield. You could map the traditional player 1 and player 2 controller inputs to various targets and bumpers, as well as to the bottom of the table for triggering a ball loss event.

You could hook up your Pi to a TFT to run animations triggered by combos, plus to track scores and balls remaining.

Does this sound like a cool project idea? Has anyone done something similar before?

That sounds great! And you can also control lights and buzzers from pico8!

Yeah. The sky is the limit. Plus you could do multiple cartridges to support different themes.

would you use the GPIO pins to detect balls going past the bumpers or other stuff?

I don't have it set up yet. I was thinking just any sort of trigger mapped to a keyboard button. I am not familiar enough with PICO-8 programming to mess with inputs besides the default.

I have now found that PICO-8 can accept commands from the entire keyboard. That would allow me to map sensors to the drain, as well as a couple dozen targets. More than enough. Heck, you could even map it to a coin mechanism.

Using the keyboard as inputs makes sense - you can only detect one event every 60th of a second, but with that caveat it gives you what you want for inputs.

I think people are mentioning GPIO pins because those are another standardized way to send and receive data from outside the PICO-8 - the manual has a section on them, including a description of how they work for a Raspberry Pi. In that case, it's 32 pins - physical binary pins on the Pi - that PICO-8 can use as either inputs or outputs.

It'd be a way to skip doing any shenanigans with faking keyboard inputs, perhaps. Or, if you want more I/O, it's 32 outputs to go with your however-many keyboard inputs.

Yes! Using the entire keyboard and mouse is meant for development mode, not regular games (that’s why a notice «devmode active» pops up). Of course some games are made for mouse and/or entire keyboard, but they are the exception.

The GPIO functions in PICO-8 let you read sensors (like buttons) attached to pins or turn on actuators (like lights) directly, without an intermediary translation to keyboard inputs.

Oh, okay. So it wouldn't take a lot of hacking to turn a PICO Pi into a brain for a pinball machine. Nice.