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:


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)


> 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.


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
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