Serial expatriate.
A demake of the DOS intro for Ultima V, one of my favourite games of all time. You can watch the original intro here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XN1mdyvZvM
Holding down Button 1 (Z) will speed up the animation, pressing Button 2 (X) will skip to the next scene; otherwise this is non-interactive.
Turns out that 16x16 sprites blow out the spritesheet pretty quickly, so I had to pack extra sprites into map data and didn't have enough leftover space for fancy logo lettering; but I quite like how the demade titling turned out anyway. Otherwise I've tried to be as faithful to the original as possible, including reverse engineering the in-memory tile animations they used, which was a learning experience. I scored it using Stones rather than the original intro music though, because Stones is kind of the signature tune of the Ultima series.
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(There have been other rants on this topic, but most of the discussion seems to predate the move to token counting.)
So I'm brushing up against the compressed codesize limit with a cart that's barely halfway towards the token limit. It sounds like this is unusual, and from what I can tell it's because I'm commenting the code fairly thoroughly.
And I have to wonder, what is the intent behind the compressed size limit? What is it still meant to accomplish that the token limit doesn't already?
The token count is a rough representation of binary or bytecode size, which was an authentic historical constraint for many systems. It's measurable from within the editor: a coder can see at a glance how many tokens they have left and how they are affecting that number as they type. While it's approximate, it's directly correlated to code complexity, and this makes it fairly intuitive to reason about. The steps for reducing token count are also intuitive: simplify code, improve code sharing, generate data rather than hardcoding it, do more with less.
The token limit defines a scope for pico-8 cartridges; it encourages creative solutions and algorithmic content generation, and it plays off the other cart limits by discouraging tactics like offloading data into code.
Compressed code size, on the other hand, is a representation only of [i]how much entropy your source code exhibits
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A demake of MT-32 music tracks from Ultima VII, half-assedly arranged for pico8's 4-channel synth. This started out as a way to practice transcribing music by ear, but in the end I cheated and used the original MIDIs as a reference.
It currently includes only the diegetic music from the game, i.e. music that plays from instruments in the game world. I may try to squeeze in one of the longer themes from the game as well, though the cart is kinda tight for sfx space.
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