I love fantasy consoles like Pico-8 and Tic-80 (and all the various others). I haven't done too much with TIC-80 as I ironically find the less restrictive restraints compared to Pico-8 harder for me to work with. It's almost easier to get started when you have 8x8 sprites, a 128x128 screen and only 16 colors. Once you lessen those restrictions it can be more daunting.
Making fifty TIC-80 carts in a weekend
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Re: Making fifty TIC-80 carts in a weekend
#22Some great inspiration to dig back into fantasy consoles
Re: Making fifty TIC-80 carts in a weekend
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
I saw Pico8 a while ago and really liked it! Now I'm trying to make it "real", by creating a physical console that implements the API: https://github.com/DavidVentura/PicoPico It's heavily incomplete, but it runs "Celeste" on an ESP32. Some small games also run in the Raspberry Pico (RP2040), but it does not have enough RAM for medium-large games.
Hi @deivid, I've been following your project for a while, and would like to collaborate. I am working on a similar Game console project and working on adding support for fantasy console support Pico8 or Tic80. https://github.com/codetiger/GameTiger-Console
Sure! Feel free to message me in github or via email.
I've abandoned my Pico8 on RP2040 port though, a lot of games simply need more memory than there's available. There's this crazy guy: https://github.com/yocto-8/yocto-8/blob/main/doc/extmem.md that managed to get external RAM over SPI working (RP2040 does not support memory remapping)
On ESP32 with SPIRAM (/PSRAM) Pico8 is definitely achievable, and _most_ games will run at a playable frame rate, but some won't; as an example "Rockets!", does too many calculations per frame to run smoothly, and the Lua overhead starts showing so I'm exploring ideas like an optimizing compiler that can run off-console, etc.
I don't thing TIC-80 will be doable, the constraints are significantly more relaxed. A Pico8 framebuffer is 32KB; in TIC-80 it is 64KB (and this doubles with buffering/DMA) but most importantly, code is no longer something simple like Lua
Re: Making fifty TIC-80 carts in a weekend
#24If you liked this fantasy console approach, you should also check https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php , it is not OSS, but have really great community and support.
If anybody is interested in a curated list of cool PICO-8 carts, here’s a post with my favorites: https://memalign.github.io/p/pico8.html
Snowfight! I remember that from way back.
Re: Making fifty TIC-80 carts in a weekend
#25I love the uses of random noise here to create texture and shading at the same time.