I saw someone post a suggestion for SPLORE to add a "play random cart" feature (especially for new game exploration on a handheld without keyboard/web browser, once you get past the list of Featured and New loaded in SPLORE). I liked that idea.
While having that in SPLORE would be cleanest and would stay up to date, I hacked together a quick prototype for myself that loads a random Featured Cart (from a scraped list of the 340 carts on the Featured board as of June 2021) to play around with.
If using it on a handheld it requires an internet connection, of course.
It also adds a Select/Enter menu option to each cart that lets you chain to a new random cart.
It works great! Added it to favorites and I'm good to go. Thanks!
Nice, glad to hear!
I looked into adding a mode to select a random cart from "all carts", but there were too many (5000+) to trivially hard-code a list in the cart without digging into data compression, so this will stay as "Featured Carts" for now.
I am thinking it might be useful to add a way to save which cart you just played, so that when you're chaining between random carts you see the previous cart ID (in case you liked it and want to write it down).
Idea is great, discovered of few nice titles... But I have no idea how to find some of them again.
1st simple suggestion : instead of "new random cart" as the go back label, do something like
"quit #12345 and reroll" or something, so we get the chance to write down the ID of carts we like.
ideally, when going back, it would be nice to be able to sort the cart into categories.
Some way to import/export lists of sorted carts would also be nice.
Showing the carts by game title rather than by id might also be interesting.
If you need help, things like clicking 300 games and noting their titles in a spreadsheet, for example, feel free to ask.
Glad you found it useful and thanks for the feedback. I will note that if you've bought standalone PICO8, this is now mostly obsolete, because the newer "Lucky Draw" feature in SPLORE does something similar.
I'll look into adding the idea of showing the cart ID (and maybe name) before you reroll, that seems very doable. The others are probably harder because I don't see a place to store category/meta data.
Let me see if I have an easy way to get an updated list of Featured carts since 2021-06-26, if not I may take you up on an offer to help manually compile a list of IDs and names...
I think the space of the randomcart normally used for sprites and map is the most practical place for storing the user provided categorization.
You can write to it with cstore, and read it with peek.
It would have to contain the labels of the categories, the number of games in each categories, and the list of carts in each categories. Since the list of games is static, each "game" in the list can just be an index in the list, so 9 bits worth of data per entry with 300+ games.
With 12Kb of sprite+map data, that should be sufficient.
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