Hello All,

I am a new PICO-8 user, but a fairly experienced raspberry pi/linux user. Yet, I find myself completely stumped.

I am trying to get PICO-8 running on my RPi 3 running the latest raspbian OS. My Pi is a network-only device with no monitor or keyboard plugged in.

I would like to access PICO-8 either via SSH (terminal-only) access, or via VNC.

Currently, when I attempt to run the pico8 binary executable on both SSH and VNC I get a hung terminal and have to kill the process from another session. When I attempt to run pico8_dyn on both SSH and VNC, I get:

SDL Error: rpi not available

** FATAL ERROR: Unable to initialize SDL

I've installed all SDL2 library packages via apt-get, including the -dev packages. When the terminal is hung, it does not respond to CTRL-C, or CTRL-Q. I have made the binary executable via chmod a+x.

Any help or insight here would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Yeah, pretty certain you can't do that. The reason SDL initialisation fails is that you dont have a primary display to bind to as you're remoting in.

A quick update, for posterity.
Two options keep coming up:
1) x11vnc
2) DirectCapture option from RealVNC

x11vnc sounds like the most straightforward solution, and googling returns some impressive results. That being said, I have yet actually get it to work in my use case. I get the same hung terminal.

I've also tried RealVNC DirectCapture and though the PICO-8 terminal now launches on my VNC viewer, the system does not register and keyboard commands it seems. This might also be a good option, but RealVNC seems pretty clear that this is an experimental feature, so I am not sure how much work has gone into it.

Finally, I went ahead and plugged in an HDMI monitor and I can see pico-8 launching on the monitor when I am using VNC, which leads me to believe it's definitely something with the surface that's getting written to. VNC typically cannot read the video memory in-memory surface, but I also cannot rewrite PICO-8 to call the software surface, so I will need a solution like DirectCapture or x11vnc that can forward the in-memory surface somehow. At least, this is my thinking so far...

I have the same issue using RDP.

Did you happen to find a solution? I’m stumped.