I have seen a number of pico-8 home-made consoles and had an idea: what if there was a pico-8 operating system, designed for making that sort of thing.

--If I am confusing or missing big parts of the idea, please let me know!

here is what I came up with:

1 .p8cart file:
this is a (renamed) folder formatted like this:

------.p8cart folder------

game.p8
data folder
subcart folder

--data folder--
this is where the game data saves to
--subcart folder--
all extra cards loaded by the main game go here

old idea:

good idea

@zep what do you think about this?

It is a huge undertaking to make an operating system. I don’t think that it would fit as a lexaloffle project at all.

A lot of it is really just slight changes to the current system
ex: cart list could just instead list carts from specified folder
new filetype could just be an extension change
save cartdata to local folder, rather than appdata
loads directly into cart list

(the operating system part could just be done via command (not part of the application but done by the user) to run it on device startup and I'm not sure about reading things like usb for data)

MMMMMM GAMEBOI LIKE
Maybe like a SNES classic menu?

snes classic menu + favorites tab of splore is kind of my idea

> A lot of it is really just slight changes to the current system

No, it really isn’t. An operating system is responsible for connecting to all hardware components, managing programs, starting user sessions, displaying windows… It is a ton more than what pico-8 is doing.

Hmm thanks for pointing that out

Better new idea: in main post

(just a note: your youtube and itch links are broken — you’re supposed to put usernames only, not full addresses)

k

What pico8 really needs is for the at least the player software to be opensourced. I understand why it hasn't been, at the end of the day pico8 is a product. However, we already have the web player. If the official pico8 player was open sourced, it would be easier for hardware projects to run pico8 games. So far, every project outside the pocket chip has had to be essentially made from scratch. Most lack features as well

unless I remember wrong, zep has said that a runtime library for pico8 will be released some time after we get 1.0. of course the full program will still be interesting for the editors and splore.