I made some external tools for PICO-8 on Windows.

- p8run.exe
p8run.exe sets the focus to PICO-8 and automatically presses Ctrl+R.
If PICO-8 is not running, the command of the argument is executed.

Download:p8run.zip (123KB)

- Tabreng8

Tabreng8 is an external sprite editor. It is suitable for Windows tablet.

Download:tabreng8.zip (566KB)

p8run works great, thanks a lot!

So the p8run is like a file watcher that will auto-reload when I change the P8 file? Like BrowserSync for Pico-8?

@morningtoast: no, you have to launch the p8run exe.

I set it up on f9 in notepad++ (I'm used to f9 in code::blocks)
(setup notepad++ to run a cart)
then p8run launches pico8 from np++, or send a ctrl-r if it's already running.

caveats:

• if you have several pico8 instances you'll most likely reload the wrong one
• ctrl-r won't work if you went in the editors or your cart is in an error state (and maybe for other reasons). always look for the bottom red banner, when in doubt you'll have to close & relaunch.

Could do also a tool that embeds Pico8 cart into any PNG the size of standard PNG cart image or bigger? AFAIK Pico-8 stores the data using some form of steganography, most likely 1 byte per pixel (using lowest 2 bits of each RGBA values I think). All you'd need to do is to make it take Pico-8 cart data, read these in and put into the png selected (and adding an alpha channel if necessary). I've seen people doing it manually in the past, one person did encode Pico-8 cart into a photo of a cat, if I'm not mistaken, but no tool for doing that ever surfaced to my knowledge.

Such tool would make it really easy to do carts with custom "box art" instead of screenshot from the game.