Big Mapper

Click here for Github Repo for BigMapper

This is a utility for pico8, designed for editing map data. It will eventually be expanded upon, allowing you to edit and save to the pico8 extended memory. Its current major feature is allowing you to edit maps at 256x256 pixels, giving you a lot of breathing room.

I have chosen not to upload this to the bbs, for two reasons:

1. It doesn't run properly on the web, due to the inability to pass commandline arguments to pico8 at startup.
2. This is very much a "dev" tool, and not having it on your local PC doesn't make sense for its intended use case.

That being said, I encourage you to check it out, if for no other reason than to see how nice it is to have high-res utilities, and to see how easy it is to make them!

Setup

This cannot be run standalone - it must be run from the pico8 desktop client.

1. Run this file from commandline, with the following arguments:

   pico8 -displays_x 2 -displays_y 2 mapper.p8

2. Code editing only takes place in the upper-left quadrant, which is why i edit the code externally in mapper.lua.
3. Usage instructions:

   Pan map around: ESDF Select a different sprite to place: Arrow Keys Switch between paint (point) and fill modes: B Save current map to cart ROM: 5 Export current map to another cart (you will need to edit line 187): 4 Paint or fill: Left mouse click Dropper: RIght mouse Click Undo: Z -- may be buggy!

Running in multi-display

If you are mostly interested in multi-display, this is my current understanding of it:

1. You must run pico8 client from commandline, with the following args:

   pico8 -displays_x X -displays_y Y -- X and Y are how wide and tall the displays will be, integers

2. Within your cart, you must enable multidisplay with a poke:

   poke(0x5f36,1)

3. You now have access to four displays! you must switch between them manually, and draw to them separately. This is a major CPU consumer!

   function _draw() for i=0,3,1 do _map_display(i) clr(i) circ(64,64,10,i+2) end end

Check out my mapping cart for tips on drawing across all displays seemlessly!