Hello again. I've been working on different ideas for running Pico 8 games on physical media.

I've tried SD cards and while they are cool and can function as cartridges, they tend to have too much storage and I find that wasteful when Pico 8 games are less than a megabyte. I have been experimenting with other ideas such as using 3.5" floppies. They are much more smaller in storage compared to a SD card, but they have their own setbacks.

What would you recommend I try to use as physical media for Pico 8 games? I could try ROM cartridges, but they will probably be the most expensive route and be the most complicated.

Here is a picture of a Pico 8 game I put on floppy.

The tutorial I made for mounting SD cards 'should' work for floppies with slight changes.
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=44530

I'm not going to sell Pico 8 games that aren't mine on physical media, I'm just trying out new ideas.

You can buy 1MB USB sticks in a variety of designs and colours from ebay and amazon. Not sure if smaller ones exist.

First problem with using a 3.5" disk is no one has a drive so you may as well go the whole hog and use cassette tapes (ZX Spectrum/Commodore 64 style)? 😀

ha... briliant idea
i made a little handheld with floppys and mounted them . i used a usb floppy-drive its relative simple
i just mounted the floppy to a directory in the pico 8 folder and load it from there

sudo mount /dev/sda /home/pi/pico-8/floppy
/home/pi/pico-8/pico8 -run /home/pi/pico-8/floppy/spiel.p8

the only problem i head(in germany) is to get floppys i had some old ...but thy where in no good condition so i gave up the projekt, but it workt pretty well

You can find new old stock of floppies and there might be some companies producing new floppies. I used IBM formatted floppies (formatted as FAT) and they seem to work just fine.

Me When P.S.D.C.:

Does your Pico-8 device have a camera ? Does it have access to the internet ?
If the device has both, all you need is a piece of laminated printed cardboard with the picture and a barcode with a link to the game, but using splore would be more convenient.
If you have a camera but an offline device, your "cart" could be a little booklet with your label as cover, and a few barcodes on the other pages for the cart data.

Of course, it would be far less convenient than a single memory card or usb stick with your entire collection.

Otherwise, you could fake the ROM approach : I've bought a portable famiclone that was sold with 6 "game packs" cartridges.
I opened one of these so called "carts" and was ROFL seeing that the cart contained exactly 0 components and a pcb where internally only two of the pins where connected...
The console had all the games internally and was using the connections to display the games of the inserted "cart".
This also explained why the other packs for sale had the same games just bundled differently with just a few unique ones on each pack...