Multicart is really a nice expansion feature, to offer content beyond the 32K boundary.
However, with reload not supporting BBS-hosted carts, large games are banned from BBS.
Is that something considered in the pico roadmap to bring back multicart games to the "official" forums?
Note that supporting more than a couple of data carts will require rework of the BBS file management.
- support for upload many files at once
- support for listing cart identifiers
- support for headless export of p8.png (limited to html/bin at time of writing)
- ability to assign same id pattern to many carts (ex: vracing_0... vracing_10)
Cheers


Agreed, no multicart on the BBS is a severe bummer and puts PICO-8's home turf at a disadvantage compared to silly little upstarts like itch.io. ;)
I'd hope the hurdle to make reload() from other carts work on the BBS isn't too tall for it to happen.
(I personally thought it was already possible, or I might have been bugging @zep about it already. I have a project I was working on a year back that was expecting to take advantage of it, but then that computer died hard and I still need to recover the drive with my PICO-8 stuff on it. It's discouraging to think it won't be possible even when I get around to doing that.)


I think this looks good locally, but holistically would be quite disruptive. At once, I would love to make it easier for people to play games like Virtua Racing Demake more easily, but over time I suspect it would create a lot of gravity towards what would functionally be and feel like 282k cartridges, which I really want to steer clear of.
What /is/ possible on the BBS however (and what I believe is within the spirit of BBS's 32kcart-world), is to CSTORE cartridge data, and then load it from another BBS cart. So it is possible to make loader carts that CSTORE themselves with a set name (using the 4th parameter), and then daisy-chain back to the main cartridge or to another loader.


@Felice The CSTORE'ed data is saved locally -- there's no way to store a cart to the BBS from a running cart. (Although later, it will be possible to UPLOAD a cart from commandline instead of using the web cart submitting interface).
Try:
LOAD #APPLE_WRITER RUN LOAD #APPLE_READER RUN |
appledat.p8 is stored locally ~/pico-8/cstore
This means that carts can clobber other cart's cstored data (no matter who the author is), but when cstoring to self a different naming scheme is used that can not be reached by other carts (based on the cart's hash content -- so it changes each time a cart is updated).
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