I've been on a bit of a trip these past few days trying to understand how to use PICO-8 on the Raspberry Pi. I've been quite successful in most regards of setting everything up, custom Emulation Station theming and properly booting .PNG cartridges from ES directly into PICO-8.

What has been its own specific issue, however, is trying to get both cartridges and .sh files to work with the Raspberry Pi version of PICO-8. The "best" options currently seems to be to make a whole extra .sh file for each individual game, or to make a custom extra overhead script that would verify if the selected option was either a .sh file (or any arbitrary file extension that isn't a .p8 or .PNG), in which case boot SPLORE, or when it is a .p8 or .PNG, run those. This shouldn't be the hardest thing in the world, but it seems that way to me since the Raspberry Pi doesn't like to hand over the original file's extension to any script I've tried so far. If this does turn out a succes I'll for sure post an update on this idea.

I'm probably stupid which is usually true, BUT, it also kind of hit me that there's no simple way to boot SPLORE from outside PICO-8 on all versions, Windows and Mac included. One of the nice appeals of SPLORE on the Raspberry Pi/Linux, especially as handhelds become more and more common, is that it makes browsing games easy without much need to type. I don't know how hard it would be to implement something like this, but if PICO-8 had its own SPLORE cartridge to load, it could alleviate just a small issue I might be the first to have had running through the gauntlet setting up this project.