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I use Dropbox to share my PICO-8 carts, screenshots, and gifs between my desktops and laptop. It's extremely useful to use it that way. It means all my carts in are one place, they're all saved to the cloud, and I never have to worry about which carts are on which device. (Another bonus is that I only have to update PICO-8 in one place, Dropbox, when a new version comes out.)

The TL;DR is just installing PICO-8 in a folder in Dropbox, and then tweaking the config file on each device to make sure it uses the Dropbox folder as where stores the carts and images (screenshots and gifs).

I know there are probably tweaks that could be done to this guide for each person's individual setup, and maybe there are ways to improve what I have set up here, but this has worked for me for half a decade, so.... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Also, I primarily use Windows machines, so this setup may need tweaking to make this kind of setup work on MacOS or Linux. (It should be effectively the same process, though.)

Here are the steps I use:

1) I install PICO-8 into a folder on Dropbox. I'll call that folder D:\Dropbox\pico8 for simplicity. (My actual path to PICO-8 in Dropbox is way longer, has spaces, etc.)

2) I run PICO-8 from that folder so that it creates the appropriate files and folders in my AppData folder at C:\Users\Dylan\AppData\Roaming\pico-8

3) I create a carts and images folder in D:\Dropbox\pico8

4) I create a symbolic link folder for both carts and images in the root of my C:\ drive by opening up a Command Prompt window and typing the following:

cd c:\
mklink /d pico8-carts d:\dropbox\pico8\carts
mklink /d pico8-images d:\dropbox\pico8\images

This step requires some explanation, and this step might not be necessary for you, but I do it because my full Dropbox folder path has spaces in it and that seems to not work with PICO-8's config file settings.

A symbolic link is a like a fake folder that points to a real folder. So I'm effectively making a fake c:\pico8-carts folder that, when you open it, actually goes to D:\Dropbox\pico8\carts instead.

5) Now I edit my PICO-8 config.txt file to use these new folders. Specifically, I ensure that these settings are set in the config.txt file:

// Location of pico-8's root folder
root_path c:\pico8-carts

// Desktop for saving screenshots etc. Defaults to $HOME/Desktop
desktop_path c:\pico8-images\

If the settings aren't already in your config.txt file, go ahead and add them. (The lines that start with // are just comments and can be ignored if they aren't there or are different.)

This makes sure that PICO-8 is looking at the "fake" folders created with mklink above for saving carts and screenshots/gifs. While PICO-8 thinks they are being saved to c:\pico8-carts and c:\pico8-images, they are actually being saved into my Dropbox folder.

I then do steps 2-5 on each device. Now, when I save or load a cart, or I save a screenshot or gif, it goes to Dropbox instead and everything stays in sync.

I'm happy to answer questions on this process, and if you have suggestions for improving it or changing it, feel free to comment below. Like I said above, there are probably many ways of simplifying this process or making it cleaner (like using command line arguments instead of changing the config.txt, for example) but this works for me and I thought others might benefit from its use.

P#77028 2020-05-22 19:15 ( Edited 2020-05-22 20:04)

People talk about working out of Dropbox, but just doing the whole install there is so smart. Well played.

P#101228 2021-12-02 02:58

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