hi there! I saw your post today and was immediately overjoyed to help bring one of my favorite games from my childhood to PICO-8. I've already started laying the code foundations. I'm currently reading up on the use of tline for the rotation of the sprite. I've got a basic mockup with the left and right pieces moving (without rotation) and crossing right at the middle. I'm not sure how to share what i've made with you so i'll try to add here the cartridge with my changes.

Wanted to let you know i got the tline rotation working :) Had to make a very slight adjustment on the map(had to make the right side symmetrical to the left - put black on the last column on the right, top to bottom, and readjusted the stripes on the top right to make it balanced). Sending in a new copy of the cart. Had to add an row of tiles similar to the square because tline needs to sample from tiles on the map. Also had to change the placement of the sprite you had put on place 00 on the spritesheet because it would never be rendered from that place - pico seems to assume that square on the spritesheet is empty. It is now on place 19. What is your idea for that sprite? It is similar to a sprite the original game had on the touch screen when the pen touched the ds screen. Since the game will have button controls, it could be used as part of the machinery for the paddle or/in addition to a sort of "mascot" in the menus and such?

@MelodyAriel That Costume Was A Joke

Ok, ok. I thought it looked cute and was a good tribute to a flavor piece on the original… No need to get mad…
I’ve made some progress since the last message and managed to make the square completely filled in during the rotation, except for the middle hole. The hole moves a bit during rotation but I haven’t been able to correct that. The velocity is adjustable and they will still rotate in tandem.

@Elidavididi Here goes a more up to date cart. Made some tweaks to the tline and removed the extra grey squares from the map. Also temporarily remove the hole from the rotating squares (not the sprite, only from the tline) and I am experimenting with an implementation for the holes that won't depend on tline and that i hope will make them have more stable positions. The paddle and arrows are implemented in the code, i'm only tweaking the gameplay mechanic to make the paddle shoot the arrow.
>> two extra things i've done: the missed squares will now appear to slide down, like in the original; added a sprite of a sort of "spring" to explain the function of the paddle >> right now it's not implemented in the code of the paddle and it appears as part of the map, and right now it is also serving as the crutch to avoid adding another grey thing with a fixed position on the screen for use by the tline function. The lower part of the sprite would be in a fixed position and the upper part is the spring which would move the paddle up and then back to original position.
I'll be working on the "paddle firing the arrow" and the new hole implementation. Tell me what you think and if you want me to I can change stuff.