So, PICO-8's built-in tracker has a startling amount of customization, but it can be kinda tricky actually making a custom SFX instrument when you want one - so a few of us on the Discord, me and @jo560hs and @bikibird, were thinking it might be interesting to look at the list of General Midi 1 instruments as a shopping list and see how many we can knock off.
Note: Numbering of GM1 instruments is inconsistent, depending on whether the list starts with 0 or 1. Apologies for the confusingness.
And as a bonus, if we can complete the list, @jo560hs was talking about possibly making an sf2 soundfont for folks who like playing with those.
So, if you wanna jump in and add stuff to the catalog, the guidelines we decided on for convenience of people hunting down instruments afterwards are these:
- tag the post with
midilib
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For anyone who wants it, an SFX imitating an electric guitar with overdrive:
Free to use, credit appreciated.
(If you are not already familiar, the manual has a brief explanation of how custom SFX instruments work.)
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A group of us on the Discord were talking about how it'd be useful it'd be to have a big library of SFX instruments, so here's one I made a while ago to act as a ragtime piano:
Free to use, credit appreciated.
(If you are not already familiar, the manual has a brief explanation of how custom SFX instruments work.)
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A simple game in 762 compressed bytes inspired by Oregon Trail! Post your high scores below!
(Trades are allowed a maximum 5 times and you cannot "reroll" for a better trade.)
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This is Simple Shooter
Bullet barrage!
In this short basic shmup (Shoot 'em ups) you will face numerous waves of alien invaders trying to destroy our galaxy. Make them feel the taste of your space bullets and cover them with a barrage of bullets
Game Play
You must shoot down all the aliens. Also, try to collect bonus coins to get special shoots, extra lives, and shields throughout your journey of liberating the galaxy. These power-ups will be very helpful in your task of repealing alien attacks.
Controls
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Cursor movement: arrow keys
- Fire: Z
- Use special shoots: X
Controllers are also supported.
Development
I made this game based in part on the Basic Shmup Tutorial using Pico-8 for the Basic Shmup Showcase Game Jam
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Entry for the PICO-8 1k Jam, where only code is allowed (no sprites or audio) and compressed size is limited to 1024 bytes.
This is a demake of Super Hexagon. Controls are just left and right - avoid the walls for as long as possible! After game over, the game will reset after a short pause. High scores are saved.
Credit for the smallest triangle fill code goes to p01.
Revision 2: removed a remark (facepalm), made a small increase to the wall gaps, tweaked the game over screen to be quicker and wait for a button press, reduced flashing of timer a bit. 4 bytes free but can't really use them anywhere. Thanks for the feedback all.
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(v00 09-10-22)
TO LOAD THIS PICO-8 CART, in immediate mode, type:
load #nrkr
Hello !
I was unaware that Pico-8 could read raw keystrokes. While we have the ability of reading normal keystrokes, I have not seen any code from others that will register reading and determining whether or not you pressed the LEFT shift key or the RIGHT one.
This program will do just that, in addition to a whole host of other keys - that you really shouldn't press as they could be associated with a function. Yet this program does correctly read function keys for instance, F1-F12. It reads if you pressed CAPS-LOCK, NUMBER-LOCK, SCROLL-LOCK, left CTRL, right CTRL, and every other key on the keyboard.
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Feature Overview
JOIN() Join strings with a delimiter.
- Joins the argument strings with the specified delimiter.
- This function consumes 25 Token.
?join('====','----','----','----','----\n')
?join(' ',unpack({'test','[join]','is','ok!\n\n'}))
?join('\fa◆\f6','c','o','m','p','l','e','t','e\n')
?join('\-e=\-e',unpack(split('----------------------------','')))
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This function is included in the KNUTIL library.
release note
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As the title states, as far as I can tell exported carts (via export cart.bin, HTML works fine) don't have 0.2.2b's "force-pause-menu" on hold feature implemented in any form.
This is preventing me from building an exported Terra, which has the saving functionality as an option in the pause menu, accessed by holding pause while the normal pause key press is used to open the inventory. And I can't work around it easily, because the pause key is only returned the first time it is pressed. (As you probably know, Terra doesn't exactly have much space to spare)
I feel like it should be there. Especially considering this can prevent controllers from exiting the game.
If it's intentional for tools, could it be added as an export flag? So say export cart.bin -s for a "safe" export with the forced pause enabled. Or the opposite, so it uses the same default behaviour as everything else and then an "unsafe" flag would disable it.
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Rockfall Run
The next part in the rockfall series (oh no)
I'm actually pretty proud of this one. I spent quite a while on graphic effects, such as particles and clouds. Tell me what you think of it!
Features
- Fast-Paced Gameplay
- 3 Difficulty levels
- Pretty cool graphical effects (Like particles)
- Powerups
Up now on Sealsearch (My website), and itch.io if you want it somewhere other than here for whatever weird reason.
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obsolete
The technique described here uses a deprecated piece of PICO-8 functionality that will be removed in a soon-to-come PICO-8 version: " _map_display has been deprecated when running on a single display (see 0.2.6b release post)".
In recent releases it's possible to set the address in memory that PICO-8 takes its sprites from and this is a preferable way to have multiple sprite sheets available for a game (see the manual for more info; try searching for 0x5f54 and poking values like 0x80, 0xa0, 0xc0, 0xe0).
-- update: fixed a bug where I was still drawing 16x16 sprites from testing that.
Cart showing how to exploit the undocumented multiple display functions to set up extra sprite buffers that can be mapped back into memory for negligible cost.
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hi! I figure I should put my tweetcarts here to make them easier to find, so I'm making a thread of them. I'll update it anytime I make a new one so people don't have to sort through the junk on my twitter account to see them. Enjoy! all code in <280 chars to fit in a single tweet!
Fireworks 9/8/2022
[original tweet]
this one was a lot of fun! original sketch was around 700 characters and although I had to cut down on a lot of functionality, I'm really happy with how this came out and making compromises and finding tiny one character differences in ways to write code was a lot of fun. I learned a lot from this one!
Wave 9/1/2022
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A remake of snake with a few customisation features that I made over a week to try and get back into programming!
Controls:
Use the arrow keys to move the snake and to navigate the menu
Options:
You can change between 4 different backgrounds:
Blank - is just a black background
Space - adds stars flying past
Clouds - adds some pretty clouds so you can enjoy the view whilst playing snake!
Grid - adds a grid to the background for extra precision when moving your snake
You can change between 4 different palettes for your snake:
Green (Default)
Blue
Orange
The built-in help for the dset and dget functions states that the persistent memory starts at address 0x5f00. But correct adddress is 0x5e00.
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Controls: Up to flap. That's about it!
(Couldn't figure out how to update my previous cart so this is a new post, sorry! Now has a title screen of sorts though!)
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So, I'm working on a toy musical keyboard program, and I want to use SDL scancodes to detect which keys are being held - but I know that PICO-8 will pause if you hit the "P" key (whatever key that happens to be in the user's keyboard layout). So I want to detect when a "P" input is being received and stop it...
...but my current code:
--interrupt pause on P while stat(30) do if stat(31)=="p" or "◆" then --suppress pause poke(0x5f30,1) end end |
only works for the initial press - when the key starts repeating, stat(30) doesn't detect the input but PICO-8 pauses anyway.
Any suggestions? I'd rather not interrupt all pause inputs - that makes things difficult for Splore users.
Edit: Apologies to @dw817, whose explanations I apparently completely failed to parse: in the changelog for 0.2.2b it is noted that holding the pause button will always bring up the hardware pause menu, even when pause would otherwise be suppressed. This rules out any solution that involves the player holding down P that I can implement as cart programmer. (Shoutout to @cubee's
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I thought I would start an interesting thread, what kind of code have you written in Pico-8, the method you used, that is NOT included in the instructions. Some nifty tips and tricks you're certain other coders are not familiar with.
Here is one I came across in P8SCII:
Now the P8SCII help line shows here how to repeat characters
1 "\*" repeat next character P0 times. ?"\*3a" --> aaa
While it does indeed go up to 15 with the F hexadecimal 15, did you know it goes beyond that ?
So you can write code like this:
print("\#2\*w ")
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Which will neatly display a field of 32-characters across with dark violet background.
In this you can highlight a line of text thus:
print("\#2highlighted text\*w ")
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The spaces after the "*" will not spill to the next line, giving you:
What code have you discovered in Pico-8 that is not listed with the general instructions you could share with others ?
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