It's $15 to be able to write programs for the platform, but you can export them to html5 to make available for others to play online for free. There's a pretty large library of such games hosted on pico-8's website.

There are some open-source alternatives like TIC-80 and PixelVision8. Personally, I'd only recommend them over pico-8 if $15 is a serious barrier or open source is an absolute must. They all have their various strengths and weaknesses, but pico-8 seems to be the best optimized for pure, unadulterated fun.

One downside of PICO-8's closed source is that it can't easily be ported to different architectures by fans, so you're limited to Windows, Linux (x86) and the Raspberry Pi (and HTML/JS, but just the player). There's no Android port.

TIC-80, on the other hand, runs more places (Android!). And someone has ported it to run on OpenDingux portable handhelds, there's a RetroArch core, etc.

That said, PICO-8 is super, super polished and absolutely worth the $15.

There is a pico8 emulator that lets you play games on some handheld console and I understand that an Android version is in development. https://0xcafed00d.itch.io/tac08-rg350

I paid for Pico. Mostly to play games on rpi, not making them. Being closed source is still a drag since I'm used to being able to patch and adjust the things I use. That I can't is immediately felt.

Yeah and the alternatives like tic have pretty major setup problems on rpi.

In Celeste, there's an easter egg that lets you play the original PICO-8 game on an in-game computer. How was this accomplished, if porting it themselves isn't possible? Did they have to remake the entire game?

Yeah, they remade the whole game with some help from the PICO-8 developer.

https://twitter.com/MattThorson/status/1032067981600124928

They might have built their own pico-8 runtime/emulator. Alternatively, porting the game to use another Lua runtime (like LÖVE) would probably not be that hard. Ex, here's a pico-8 runtime in LÖVE:

https://github.com/picolove/picolove

It's a small game, they could port the entire game to another language or platform pretty easily.

Also OS X, it's worth saying.

Its worth the money, I wouldn't expect this sort of thing to be free.

Oh to be clear it's not that that bothers me, it's the fact that it's closed source. That's just personal preference though.

I'd be fine with a "source available" paying solution for instance, as long as the terms of the license are reasonable. This way at least I know that if the project goes defunct I'm not stuck with apps that I can't easily run anywhere anymore. See all these Flash games that nobody can easily play anymore.

An example of software that works that way is SQLite: they sell extensions as source code with a perpetual (non-open-source) license.

Yep, slightly under the cost of two decent brews for hours of fun. Lua is easy to learn, there is a ton of Pico-8 info. Give a search for the Pico-8zine, a ton of tips and great ideas. Pico-8 has been talked about here and Hackaday.

>Unfortunately it's a proprietary platform.

On the other hand, being closed source help getting the "community" feel where people discover some quirk and secret features of a strange and not-totally documented device.

That said, I hope it become open-source when every secrets have been discovered.

I haven't tried it out so I can't speak to the quality of it but there's the LIKO-12 as a free alternative: https://liko-12.github.io

TIC-80 is also good:

https://tic80.com

CHIP-8 is the progenitor of all these platforms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP-8

I've also seen SCRIPT-8 as another FOSS alternative: https://script-8.github.io/

Thank you! I've been looking for a browsser-based fantasy console.