I'm going to keep a running total of what gets blocked in Pico-8 or cannot be accessed and - as access is desirable, I'll put it as a task to add to Clipmaster so it can be run in Pico-8. So not now but this thread will get updated and often.
The two commands import() and export() do not even work online.
The command, ls and dir (same command) do not do anything in code, I remember a time they used to work, however. I could add that to Clipmaster, give you a proper directory with extensions, file sizes, etc.
There is no sortarray() command. Blitz has a very fast and robust internal sort routine. This could be added to Pico-8.
** There are no large integers, not easily. So, yeah Blitz could dip down and give us quadruple floating point accuracy or internal 64-digit integers. I know we need this ! :D
There is no loadtext() or savetext() This would be quite easy to add to Pico-8.
There is no deletefile() command. While not very useful as you can only use printh() to save to new text files, it would be useful if it would check and only have it work for .txt files.
There is no inputh() where you can read from a text file directly to a variable or array. This would be useful to have and could be done.
... many ideas ... should keep me busy for a-while.
Having seen other Pico-8 carts making use of external programs that are not pico-8 got me to thinking:
"Can this be done with Blitz ?"
Yes it can. Having decided to use the clipboard as my driver, I can do all kinds of interesting things, not just audio. And it doesn't even need to be in the same directory as your Pico-8 program. Although when you bundle your program as a final EXE, you can consider doing so.
To download my Clipmaster, required for this example, use the following address from Google Drive:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wUFty36AAHdKVNwHfMMYHKUOL25xKtXJ/view?usp=sharing
Click the down-facing arrow in the top-right-hand corner of the screen, don't clip Zip Extractor. Use 7zip to unpack if need be. Nice Freeware for unpacking ZIP files.
https://www.7-zip.org/a/7z2107-x64.exe
Run the program from there. Clipmaster 01-08-22.exe
With the EXE running, In this particular cart, press 🅾️ to play a unique sound effect that is impossible for regular pico-8 to play. And press ❎ to jump to my main website, all controlled inside Pico-8. See the source.
While it's still pretty primitive, it does open the option for useful items such as, in this case, playing audio sound effects such as WAV and OGG, even music, and a webpage launcher.
Likely there can be many more tasks and things that could be added to it, send me some suggestions and I'll see what can be coded, with your credits for the suggestion if included. :)
With the EXE running, In this particular cart, press 🅾️ to play a unique sound effect that is impossible for regular pico-8 to play. And press ❎ to jump to my main website, all controlled inside Pico-8. See the source.
From there, as long as you are running the cart in immediate mode, from EXE, or from Splore, it should work just fine. You can test it Online but must press CTRL+V each time, rather defeating the purpose of it. In immediate, EXE, or Splore, you won't need to though.
If there's interest, I should be able to add channel ability so you could fade music in on a channel and fade it out just as neatly. printh("@mus fi 01 logo.ogg","@clip") which would fade in the music logo.ogg and record its ID on channel 01. So to fade it out you could use printh("@mus fo 01","@clip")
Once you have Clipmaster running, to shut it down select it and press the Q key to exit.
This is exciting territory for me. I will be working here especially determining how BLITZ can assist with data files, load/save/update/delete. I'll limit the system to work only with .TXT and .PNG, nonetheless this opens interesting data opportunities that Pico-8 cannot follow.
As always if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to add them below.
[Please log in to post a comment]
