Tux1 [Lexaloffle Blog Feed]

Could a physical PICO-8 exist?

Sun, 22 Oct 2023 22:23:41 UTC

And I'm not just talking about putting an emulator in a specially designed box, you could obviously do such a thing. Rather, what I'm talking about is having all of the consoles hardware implemented in discrete logical chips, effectively removing the "fantasy" from the phrase "fantasy console". This might sound like a daunting, if not impossible task, but I have reason to believe it is quite possible!

You see, the official implementation of the Lua programming language doesn't just interpret it's source code by analyzing the program tree. Rather, it compiles it into a bytecode which is then emulated as a virtual machine. In fact, this virtual machine is the reason why some code takes longer to run than other code, because the program is also emulating the amount of time the CPU needs to process it.

With this in mind, it seems like it should be entirely possible to create a physical version of one, assuming that a Lua bytecode CPU actually existed. Slap it together with some RAM and a BIOS, and a surprising form of merchandise just might be born! What some of your thoughts?

Idea: The technical PICO-8 manual, since the official one kinda sucks

Thu, 09 Sep 2021 23:34:27 UTC

The PICO-8 manual as it stands today is flawed. What I mean by that is not only is it organized in such a way that makes it harder to gleam certain information out of it, but it also has flaws and inconsistencies with what the PICO-8 actually is. It also omits important information, such as cycle count and the extra 16 colors. eevee has already taken note of some of these flaws, but I still believe there may be more out there. There's the PICO-8 wiki, but that's not fully documented either. What we need is a new way of organizing known information about the PICO-8 into a manner which makes sense and is simple to use.

I propose the creation of a PICO-8 technical manual, a manual that fully documents everything the community knows about the PICO-8, both it's version of lua and it's editors, as well as the programs on it. It will be a collaborative project. Alternatively, we could fix the current PICO-8 wiki in such a way that it accounts for these flaws, is more detailed and easier to use. Both of these options I think could really help people like me who wish to delve deeper into how it works exactly.

water.p8

Sun, 28 Feb 2021 23:50:24 UTC

water.p8

by Tux1

[Click to Play]

Koi Boy PICO-8 cover

Sun, 19 Jul 2020 19:23:26 UTC

I made this a long time ago, and I thought I'd finally share it. It is the song Koi Boy by Jack Stauber, from the album Pop Food. (there was also a music video that came before the album)

koiboy

by Tux1

[Click to Play]