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.

This is fantastic. I've made a Game Boy emulator in the past, and I'm a big fan of Pico-8, so maybe I'll give this a try myself as a learning project. I wasn't aware this was really feasible.

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

Cool project!

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.