Hello, I posted about this on Reddit, but I thought people here would be interested as well. p8modem is a simple general-purpose virtual "modem" for communicating with WebSocket servers from within PICO-8 programs. I have written "picochat", a basic chat program, as a demonstration. You can find picochat here: http://p8modem.net/picochat/

p8modem is capable of sending and receiving packets of max length 128 to and from a WebSocket server. It only works when deployed as a web application, because it uses JavaScript to interact with the PICO-8's GPIO memory and relay packets to and from the server. You can find the source code for p8modem and picochat, as well as information on how to incorporate p8modem into your own programs, on GitHub: https://github.com/joshiemoore/p8modem

I'm happy to answer any questions. I would like to continue improving p8modem, and also meet people interested in using it to develop networked PICO-8 programs/games. Feel free to reach out if you're interested!

Hi @joshiemoore:

I tried out your program, yep, there was no-one there, yet this would be a great feature for Pico-8 itself to have without requiring a separate and dedicated website.

There was talk of giving each Pico-8 user say 256-bytes of storage and data that all carts could share. Would be interesting.