I just bought PICO-8 and I'm excited to get to learning how it works, but after experimenting for a little bit in the editor, there were a few things that were really bothering me -- I'm asking here to see if I'm just doing something wrong, or if there are devkit mods/hacks to fix these things.

1. Is it possible to enable stereo audio somehow? I'm guessing no, but is there a hack/mod that adds this in? I like the limitations of the music editor as it is for the most part, but for some reason the lack of panning bothers me. I really want to get some nice ping-pongy waterfall stereo arpeggios!

2. Is there some way I can somehow force Lua to act like arrays are 0-indexed instead of 1-indexed? Some kind of macro or precompiler?

3. Is there a way to delete notes in the tracker "in-place" -- without everything after that moving backwards? It really messes with the rhythms, and as far as I can tell there's no way to insert a blank space back in to push things back where they belong. So every time I want to delete a note, I have to either move to the volume section, enter a zero, and move back, or press backspace and then copy-paste everything back where it should be

4. Is there a setting I can change somewhere to make CTRL-X in the tracker cut notes instead of just copy them?

5. Lastly, is it possible to change the font somehow? I find the default font very hard to read, even as somebody without dyslexia. An alternate, hi-res, dyslexia-friendly font would be really helpful.

I am not aware of any such mods.

1: I don’t know anything about audio, but maybe some of the great tutorial series on youtube have some tricks.

2: No

3,4: The controls can’t be changed. I get tripped often by the lack of Ctrl-X for sprites.

5: No, but you can use any text editor to edit p8 files.

Some ways to do most of these things:

2. For zero-based arrays, you can use code like this, which takes advantage of one named entry before the default 1-based indices kick in:

   zerotable={[0]="first","second","third"}

   Note that the built-in length operator # will not count anything in your table except the continuous entries from 1 on, and most builtins will assume that tables start at 1. For your own tables, though, you can absolutely start at zero if you want to.

3. In the volume column (blue numbers) of the sfx tab, you can type 0 to clear a note and move down to the next space. Shift-clicking the zero-volume bar will also clear all notes, by setting all volumes to zero. Edit: oops, you already knew about this. See 5 for another option, though it won't be a quick one.

4. See 5.

5. If you're talking about the font for the tracker, not easily. You could write your own tool cartridge with a custom font that plays notes when you type in the same way that the built-in tracker does, and then you can write custom behaviors for Ctrl-X, etc (since that key combo is a specific katakana you can grab with stat(31) when devkit mode is enabled). That code is up to you to write, though, and you'll need to know a lot about the PICO-8 sound data and cstore, so it updates the cartridge in the same way that the builtin tracker does.
   It's not easy, but it is possible, and I think some people (link) have even written music tools like that (link) already. (That one isn't uploaded yet, but if you search the bbs I'm sure you'll find a bunch of other music tools.)

> Is there a setting I can change somewhere to make CTRL-X in the tracker cut notes instead of just copy them?

I'd say this would be an excellent suggestion to make in the support/bugs forum.

It'd also be nice to have in the sprite and map editors, come to think of it.

Thanks everyone!

It's good to know that it's possible Shy, so thanks for letting me know. I doubt that I would ever get around to it though.

I might do that, Felice!