hey all, very new to the p8 community (literally purchased p8 5 minutes ago)!

i've been a developer/designer in the space for a little while and own a studio building software/games, and as of recently, my team is looking to develop one of our community-projects for the gameboy color. naturally, i have built a custom gbc with the funnyplaying ips, rechargable batteries, and have a flash cart to play homebrew games on.

this release will be sent to our community as a physical cart that we'll flash and design a beautiful box/packaging for. really pulling at those nostalgia-strings.

i have been playing porklike on my gbc nonstop, it's gotta be one of my favorite pick-up-and-play games in a long time. i've watched a few of the p8 tutorials for the game by lazy devs on yt (what lead me to purchase p8), but i'm unsure how to convert p8 roms to the gameboy?

i found a lua compiler on github that looks like it converts roms, but i wanted to ask the community directly how to get this done? i love the experience of p8 and that it's a turnkey option, but i just need to know i'll be able to convert my p8 roms to .gbc format and have it run.

not sure if porklike gb is a port that was created after, but it's hard to imagine it would be that hard to convert p8 roms to gbc.

anyways... thank you all for your help, and i'm so impressed by this community. can't wait to show everyone what we've got in the works!

Having written programs for Gameboy Advance, @bud, I would say they are worlds apart. There is no easy way to convert to Gameboy, Gameboy Color, or even Gameboy Advance.

As the PSP (Pocket Sony Playstation) does run LUA code however, that would be your closest old portable console that is a true gaming system that could run it.

This may help:

https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=31603

@dq817
this precompiler looks promising, curious if anyone has used this precompiler?

Hi all, not sure if it could be useful (it's for GBA): https://github.com/evanbowman/BPCore-Engine

a pico8 game that also exists on gbc is a complete rewrite.
the consoles are wholly different.

@bud
That precompiler is just a start. It replaces pico-8 only features with the standard Lua equivalents.

The problem with trying to convert pico-8 games to GBC specifically would be the difference in specs. GBC only has 32kB of normal memory and 16kB of video memory. Pico-8 has 32kB of memory that has various uses, with little enough used for graphics, but it also has 2MB of memory besides that. Similarly, while both have 4 channels for sound, the GBC's sound channels were of different types with separate ways to make sound. Even the drawing methods would be awkward, as the GBC's sprite drawing was restricted to only 4 colors per sprite, so sprites using more than that would need to be automatically split into multiple sprites (which was actually done in the more visually impressive GBC games).

I'm not saying it's impossible, but at the very least the majority of pico-8 games would need to be gutted in arbitrary ways during the conversion. And that's before considering that pico-8 is 32-bit while GBC is 8-bit. GBA would be easier, especially if you convert to the engine braindead posted, but then you'd still have a little under half as much memory as the limit.

I hope this is still on topic.

@bud, if Pico-8 could compile to APK then you could run the app natively on your cellphone and thousands of other cellphones, tablets, and Android emulators.

If you are just interested in running your Gameboy Color for your Android or your PC and want to see it there, there is a program for Android that runs Pico-8 bypassing the need for a Gameboy Color emulator. It's not great but it's not bad either. Called the "P8 Player."

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ylstudios.p8player&hl=en_US&gl=US

One problem is it does not recognize P8SCII.

For the RG-350 there is a very primitive Pico-8 player yet does not recognize reload() cstore() or even flip() commands.

https://0xcafed00d.itch.io/tac08-rg350

I think your best bet for maximum compatibility is when @zep finally releases a version of Pico-8 that can compile either a single APK file or multiple files that runs natively on the Android without the use of an internet browser.

thanks everyone for your suggestions and help!

our team has built out a mobile game version already as well as an html5 version for in-browser play utilizing an internal game engine we created a while ago. we wanted to make a port to the physical hardware purely as a collectible item for the community. Unfortunately at this time i'm not looking to build for anything other than original gameboy hardware, to stay true to the intent of the collectible.

i personally am picking up gbdk dev in C, but seeing that porklike is one of my fav gbc homebrew games, i wanted to give p8 a try (i also know porklike was built in p8). however what i failed to realize is "porklike gb" is simply a port of the p8 game... not natively published by p8.

for now i will continue developing with gbdk and build out the game that way. still so glad to have purchased and support this community - if i ever find "free time" in my life aside from our studio-work, i will surely be learning to build in p8. it feels like an interesting way of life as a dev ha.

thanks again, y'all are amazing!