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Joseph White // [email protected]

Edited by

@DOJI13

PICO-8 is a fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other computer programs. When you turn it on, the machine greets you with a shell for typing in Lua programs and provides simple built-in tools for creating sprites, maps and sound.

The harsh limitations of PICO-8 are carefully chosen to be fun to work with, encourage small but expressive designs and hopefully to give PICO-8 cartridges their own particular look and feel.

Display: 128x128, fixed 16 colour palette
Input: 6-button controllers
Carts: 32k data encoded as png files
Sound: 4 channel, 64 definable chip blerps
Code: Lua (max 8192 tokens of code)
Sprites: Single bank of 128 8x8 sprites (+128 shared)
Map: 128x32 8-bit cells (+128x32 shared)

ALT+ENTER: Toggle Fullscreen
ALT+F4: Fast Quit (Windows)
CTRL-Q: Fast Quit (Mac, Linux)
CTRL-R: Reload / Run / Restart cartridge
CTRL-S: Quick-Save working cartridge
CTRL-M: Mute / Unmute Sound
ENTER / P: Pause Menu (while running cart)
Player 1 default keys: Cursors + ZX / NM / CV
Player 2 default keys: SDFE + tab,Q / shift A
To change the default keys use the KEYCONFIG utility from inside PICO-8:

KEYCONFIG

After PICO-8 boots, try typing some of these commands followed by enter:

PRINT("HELLO WORLD")
RECTFILL(80,80,120,100,12)
CIRCFILL(70,90,20,14)
FOR I=1,4 DO PRINT(I) END
(Note: PICO-8 only displays upper-case characters -- just type normally without capslock!)

You can build up an interactive program by using commands like this in the code editing mode along with two special callback functions _UPDATE and _DRAW. For example, the following program allows you to move a circle around with the cursor keys. Press Esc to switch to the code editor and type or copy & paste the following code:

X = 64 Y = 64
FUNCTION _UPDATE()
IF (BTN(0)) THEN X=X-1 END
IF (BTN(1)) THEN X=X+1 END
IF (BTN(2)) THEN Y=Y-1 END
IF (BTN(3)) THEN Y=Y+1 END
END
` FUNCTION _DRAW() CLS(5) CIRCFILL(X,Y,7,14) END Now press Esc to return to the console and type RUN (or press CTRL-R) to see it in action. Please refer to the demo cartridges for more complex programs (typeINSTALL_DEMOS`).

If you want to store your program for later, use the SAVE command:

SAVE PINKCIRC
And to load it again:

LOAD PINKCIRC

The first example game.
In my opinion, it looks really cool.

The second example game.
Just spinning bunnies.

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