i'm in kind of a jam, pun intended.

i've made some hardware for my team's pico game for the portland indie game squad summer slow jam which concludes this evening. the issue is, it's an 8-player game requiring 8 controllers. i assumed (which is of course why i'm here) that i could configure one joystick for multiple players since they need only three buttons each, but that doesn't seem to be an option supported in any way by pico-8 or otherwise.

worst case scenario i can disassemble one of my other controllers and change the button usage in the program to get six players on but that's a much rougher road than i had hoped for.

any bright ideas would be deeply appreciated. thanks in advance

Yeah PICO-8 controller button mappings are locked as far as I'm aware. And since PICO-8 uses 4 directionals and 2 action buttons, there's really no good way to map 3 action buttons for 2 players onto the same controller. Giving players 2 actions would be fully doable, but with 3 you'd have people awkwardly fighting over a D-pad. (Maybe you can have holding/pressing both at once trigger action 3? It's definitely not ideal but depending on what it is it could work)

I've also had an issue where PICO-8 doesn't recognize more than 4 controllers despite supposedly having support for 8, but I haven't been able to verify if that's a PICO-8 issue or one with my computer.

well, im already way on my way to getting it done with three for six players. im using zero-delay usb encoders so splitting the six inputs between two players is no problem at least.