No-one likes to be a whistle-blower. Absolutely no-one. I am hoping I am not being one here.

We are all familiar with @zep's Pico-8 boot process. The rainbow sweep, logo, icon, and audio trill.

P8 for the cellphone is a near flawless Pico-8 emulator which runs Pico-8 carts. It does include Zep's opening logo and trill. Carts are added from the Lexaloffle website, which of course is home to Pico-8. You cannot add carts manually by uploading either from your HD or external source.

And that's fine. However I did notice on Tac-08 for the RG-350 - it does NOT show the rainbow boot pattern nor show the opening Pico-8 icon, the text on black, nor the audio trill we are so familiar with.

Importing carts to Tac-08 is a matter of uploading either the .P8 or .P8.png to your RG-350. It bypasses the need to go to Lexaloffle for these.

It shows instead a white screen with text and no sound opening. It lingers for a second. Then the cart begins.

Which is fine. =IF= it's not a hacked version of Pico-8. I just didn't know if @zep was aware of this and - should it not include his animated opening not just for copyright but identification purposes ?

Tac08 is an emulator, it implements the pico8 API and rendering using the official and community documentation. It is similar to retro8 and zepto8. The source is here: https://github.com/0xcafed00d/tac08

Not clear what the other one is; if you meant 'P8 Player' for android, then it could be another emulator, or just a webview that plays HTML games from the bbs.

The pico8 opening animation and sound have been recreated before (in cart code, here on the bbs), so seeing/hearing them does not mean a program is using the pico8 program.

Thanks, @merwok. That puts me more at ease that the early version is available as sourcecode.

However it also points out that unless there is sourcecode for the latest version we have here currently (11-13-21) 0.2.3 that there will be no more updates to Tac08.

Which is unfortunate as I have a RG-350 and was trying out Tac-08. It does not do CSTORE() or RELOAD() or even FLIP() so I abandoned it - but not before noticing it booted differently.

I'm not sure how P8 got theirs but at least they are honoring @zep with his proper bootup sequence.

And yes I was thinking at some point of recreating the opening boot in Pico-8, but then I thought - why bother with perfection ? Zep got it right the first time. :)

P8 runs games offline. I tested this. Is one of the main reasons I like it, I can play on the go and use zero bandwidth.

Will just anxiously await Picotron as most.