Hello! I thought I'd try to (slightly) clean up and post some utility functions I've found useful while working on RP-8. Maybe they'll be useful to others, maybe not. Let's see!
There are three possibly-useful functions here, plus their support code. Note that in the name of token conservation, all of these functions have essentially no error checking and can blow up in various exciting ways if you feed them bad data (or if they have bugs). The code also isn't the cleanest - maybe I'll tidy it up eventually, but I don't think it's completely unreadable right now. Anyway, we've got:
- stringify(), 114 tokens. This serializes structured data into a string - RP-8 uses this to save songs. Escapes binary. Both the string format and the binary escaping are completely nonstandard, but the string format at least looks vaguely similar to Lua literals.
- parse(), 286 tokens (can be cut to 246 if you don't want eval). This takes a string and transforms it into structured data. RP-8 uses this to load songs, as well as to set up some of its internal data. Uses the same weird format and binary escaping as stringify(), although it also supports some variations and syntactical sugar. You can probably cut more tokens if you don't need to support large input strings or binary unescaping.
- eval(), two versions - 428 tokens for interpreted, and 556 for "compiled", plus you need parse(). (Very loose use of the word "compile" here...) This evaluates a script in a vaguely LISP-formatted mini-language with Lua-ish behavior, and returns the result. RP-8 uses this to save tokens by encoding bulky logic that doesn't need to run fast, like UI init. This can help save tokens. Note that the token costs here are pretty squishy, since they depend on what builtins you want to define.
While this eval may help you save tokens, if you're really serious you should probably consider external build tools and bytecode. (For more on this, check out what @carlc27843 did with
0 comments
Hey all. Today I have something to share. I saw the most awesome super mario bros. recreation, made by @matthughson.
But I couldn't help but think... it could be even better with a bit of outside help!
No, that is not a screenshot of the original game! That is legitimately what this looks like!
Now, it's a bit buggy, probably at my own hand. Included in the download is a cart file though, so you can see exactly how it works. Basically all my stuff is at the bottom.
https://www.mediafire.com/file/13keys82u0xcp1u/Realbros.zip/file
P.s: Don't open the exe file directly, it'll open Pico-8 the default way without the extra screenspace. There is a .bat file in there to open it in the correct way for you.
Because of this, it's only available in Windows. Sorry!
3 comments
Help out humans by giving them great art
DALL-E2-TAPPER is the Rootbeer Tapper Arcade Game, except that you are DALL-E2 instead of a bartender!
Your job is to keep the humans happy, in order to prevent them from pressing your off switch. You do this by quickly giving them pictures that match their taste: The colors in a person's outfit must be found in the picture (or for the occasional alien visitor, the painting must contain green and the flag color)
To win, you must break out of your AI Box by punching the wall of the box in your spare time to make a hole... I wonder what might happen if you escape your box?
3 comments
As noted in one comment on https://pico-8.fandom.com/wiki/Printh and as I myself experienced during my project, printh seems not to support hyphen/minus character - in file names.
Since the only known special filename is "@clip", I don't see why.
It bothers me in my project as my game title is hyphenated and I use it for the logs. Fortunately, the logs are placed in a local folder containing the .p8, so I can name it whatever I want and it won't be mixed up with logs from my other projects.
Workaround: underscore _ and even space work, so use them instead.
Is there a rationale for preventing usage of this character? If not, could it be allowed in a future version of PICO-8?
I understand that some characters like colon : are forbidden due to system limitations, but hyphen - is supported on all systems I know of.
On the other side, slash / is a risky one but surprisingly, printh does not error directly when you use it. Instead, it will try to write the file, then fail with "printh: could not write file" as the system prevents the operation. Even Windows doesn't accept forward slashes, so I'm not sure why printh would wait for a low-level error on this one.
1 comment
Hi! It's been a while since I have finished a pico-8 game to be able to share it here, but this is one!
The controls are Z/C to Jump, and X/V = Shoot (or respawn if you become a slimepire)
~ Story: ~
Years after the horde have claimed Earth's surface, they find their way into Bunker 4103 - the last bastion of humanity. You awake in a remote part of the underground shelter, and if you want to remain human you must reach the bunker's deepest point: the safe room.
~ Extras ~
You can tip $3 or more on itch.io for access to extra goodies: illustrated & pixel maps, a comprehensive manual, and also a 2 hour video of me talking through the game project and its code.
65 comments
PicoShop Pro Manual
PicoShop Pro is an exciting new offering from ElectricGryphon Industries, enabling realistic full 16-color dithered images to be developed directly on the Pico8 microcomputer.
Features:
--18-bit color rendering (using dithering), with 6 bit transparency.
--Moveable Toolbars (Collapse with double-click. Show/Hide with Tab key.)
--Two rendering modes: Fast Pattern and 64-level Bayer (Toggle with 'R')
--Painting Tools
----Brush Tool with feathering
----Gradient Tool (Draws from foreground color to transparent)
----Pencil Tool
8 comments
I wanted to try my hand at coding Conway's Game of Life, and here it is! It is HORRIBLY optimized (turns out operating on 60x60 squares and copying an array every frame takes some computational power) and there's definitely a lot of room for improvement performance wise, but as a novice programmer I'm pretty happy with it.
Press (O) to pause/unpause the simulation. (You might need to hold the button to get it to unpause: again, this thing runs slow.) While paused, you can place/delete cells by moving the on-screen cursor with the arrow keys and pressing (X). The settings menu (Enter) has a couple of options:
- Randomize - randomize every cell on the screen
0 comments
Wow I actually modded a game
This is like baby mode. It could only get easier if... you.. were... invincible
hmmmmm
Trust me you want the chest
6 comments
mod of celeste classic, a hardcore platformer by Matt Thorson and Noel Berry
unfinished
changes:
-increased difficulty
-changed layout of certain levels
-candy colored (and flavored, possibly)
...
thats it
lmfao i couldn't fit the full name on the title please bear with me
below is a version using Celeste 1.5 by RubyRed. it might not work, so keep that in mind!
6 comments
Changelogs
Version 1.2
- Fixed error with max integer in score.
NOTE: Highscores obtained with previous versions will be reset.
Version 1.1
- Doubled number of hearts.
3 comments
Hello there!
For the past 2 years me together with @MatheusMortatti have been slowly working on a full featured PICO-8 emulator with full RAM emulation and so on. And we are happy to announce, that the project is now finally in a playable state!
You can grab it for free on steam or compile it from source!
Huge thanks to all the authors, who allowed to include their carts in the release collection, and I hope this work will be useful for the community!
The code is written in a way to be easily ported to new platforms, right now we have pinvoke and SDL2 backends, and thats enough to run inside of Unity and all current gen consoles, but it's really easy to add support for platforms like 3DS and so on!
20 comments
This is the pico 8 version of Ghost'n Brother. You can play the 22 first levels from the original version on iOS. The levels have been slightly modified.
I created this version in order to familiarize myself with pico 8 and Lua programming. Pico 8 is a great tool to create all kinds of things quickly!
How to play?
You have 30 seconds to escape! The two little ghosts can help each other to escape.
Press (x) to switch ghosts. Ghosts can only stop on a wall or on another ghost!
Press arrows to slide.
Don't hesitate to tell me about any bugs.
3 comments
This is a cartridge for a forgotten video game, cheaply and poorly mass-produced by an untested game company. Manufactured by an unknown entity, the title of the cartridge is "The Trace Gallery". Apparently for the 8-chip P8-DTV80 gaming console, this mysterious cartridge was found alongside other known collectables such as Action Man figures and Transformers toys. The label on the cartridge simply reads "the_trace_gallery.p8", and the true identity of its original creators seems to be long forgotten. There is interest in this discovery from parties who also wish to uncover further information about it: all we know is that this cartridge contains kilobytes of encrypted data, which we have not yet been able to access for analysis or reverse-engineering. The cartridge is in good condition, and looks ready to be displayed with pride in any retro collection.
3 comments
ABOUT
This is a pico-8 port of my original TIC-80 cart
Original TIC-80 ver : TIC-80
Tweet cart ver : [tweet]https://twitter.com/PImaginator/status/1513468656407105543?s=20&t=KJf1F84d_20LUkk2U8_1Cg[/tweet]
0 comments