Awesome PICO-8

A curated list of PICO-8 resources, tutorials, tools and more. Inspired by the awesome list thing. You might also like awesome-lua and awesome-love2d.

PICO-8 is a fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other computer programs. When you turn it on, the machine greets you with a shell for typing in a subset of Lua commands and provides simple built-in tools for creating your own cartridges.

Contents

• Community
• Demoscene
• Resources
• Tutorials
• Tools
• Assets
• Text Editors Language Support
• Hacks
• Hardware
• Articles & Posts
• Talks
• Clones
• Contributing
• License

Community

• Lexaloffle
  • Blog
  • PICO-8
  • Forum/BBS
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Youtube
• Subreddit
• #pico8 on Twitter
• #pico8 on Freenode
• Pico-8 Console News
• Pico-8 Wiki
• Slack Team - PICO-8 Slack chat.
• Discord Server - PICO-8 Discord chat.

DemoScene

• Pico-8 demos on Demozoo
• Pico-8 demos on Pouet
• Article with demoscene effects code
• Pico-8 demos on Youtube

Resources

• Official Manual - Placeholder dump of pico-8.txt! (Proper manual coming soon).
• PicoZine #1, #2, #3 and #4 - PICO-8 Zine is a 48-page fanzine made by and for PICO-8 users.
• Going from Lua 5.2 to PICO-8's Lua - This document is here to help folks with a proficiency in Lua understand the limitations and discrepencies between Lua and PICO-8's Lua.
• Cheat Sheet (printable) - A reduced cheat sheet in a printable format. German and English version available.
• Cheat Sheet (wallpaper) - An enhancement of the printable cheat sheet for use as a desktop wallpaper.

Tutorials

• Music Tracker Tutorial Series - Making audio with PICO-8.
• Tron Lightcycle game from scratch - A quick introduction to PICO-8 writing a game from scratch.
• A PICO-8 Spaceshooter in 16 GIFs - Screencaptures of writing a Spaceshooter game step by step.
• Token optimization - tips&tricks for saving tokens.
• Tweetjam, BBS thread - cards which code fits in a tweet (really useful to learn some fun techniques).
• Sample code on the BBS - the search is not 100% accurate, but some of those cards features some nice tricks you can re-use in your future code.
• Newgrounds Medals Tutorial - a little tutorial to add Newgrounds Medals to PICO-8 games.
• Binary save system - Custom game save system that supports various data types

Tools

• Sprite Editor - Keyboard only 8x8 pixel art tool.
• pico2png - Spritesheet extraction written in perl.
• Spritesheets and tools for the PICO-8 Palette - Compilation of works assest and tools using the PICO-8 palette.
• Pico8Utils - Compilation of lua scripts based on the unix philosophy for working with .p8 files.
• picotool - Tools and Python libraries for manipulating Pico-8 game files.
• p8dl - Carts Downloader - Python - Downloads cartridges into the correct folder (looks at your config.txt).
• Pico-8 Carts Downloader - Bash - Downloads cartridge from the BBS (single cart, whole index or dump your favourited entries) & rename them according to their metadata.
• p8 responsive webplayer transform - Python script that makes your HTML export page responsive.
• Color Palette - Hex and RGB colors codes for web.
• PICO-8 font - by RhythmLynx.
• pico-test - PICO-8 testing framework.
• Lib-Pico8 - A Pico-8 library of useful common functions.
• pico8-missing-builtins - Provides Lua built-in functions to pico8.
• P8Coder - A programming tool that replaces the lua code in pico-8 cartridges (p8) with the code you write in P8Coder.
• Pico-Kit - An opinionated collection of Pico-8 helpers that make it easier to get going. Adds OOP, better debugging, and physics.
• picoDeploy - Deploy Pico-8 carts as standalone applications on desktop (Electron) and mobile (Ionic).
• pico8Grunt - A build system for pico8 games, using gruntjs.
• PICO-EC - A tiny scene-entity-component library created for the PICO-8 fantasty console.
• PICO-Tween - A small library of tweening/easing functions for use in the PICO-8 fantasy console, inspired by Robert Penner's easing functions.
• p8 - A dependency manager and build tool. Lets you share code/sprites, require() dependencies, and auto-reload carts on save. Works with any external code editor and supports MoonScript.
• MIDI to PICO-8 - A tool to convert MIDI files to PICO-8 music.
• midi2pico - A MIDI to PICO-8 converter.
• Denote - Converts MIDI files into SFX data-- interactive and web based.
• Custom template - A simple and clean template, that fixes issues with fullscreen, mouse and just looks nice.
• Fillp Tool - A simple helper tool for generating fillp patterns.
• Depict - Converts image into a dithered image using PICO-8 colors and reduces it to a maximum size of 128 x 128.
• picoCAD - A PICO-8 program to build and texture lowpoly 3D models.
• pico8-deploy - An easy way to export and deploy PICO-8 projects to itch.io
• yap8b - Build tool for creating pico carts from multiple source files.
• TS-PICO-8 - Create PICO-8 games using TypeScript.
• Shrinko8 - A minifier that aggressively shrinks Pico-8 code size. Also includes a linter and other tools.
• parens-8 - Bypass the Lua token limit with a tiny lisp interpreter/compiler.

Assets

• midilib - Custom SFX instruments

Text Editors Language Support

• Visual Studio Code: pico8-ls - PICO-8 Language Server, providing full language support for the PICO-8 dialect of Lua.
• Atom: language-pico8
• Sublime: Sublime PICO-8 - PICO-8 plugin for the Sublime Text editor (color scheme, font, build system, code completion, snippets...).
• Vim: vim-pico8-syntax
• Emacs: pico8-mode

Programming Fonts

You might be interested to install pico-8 programming fonts they support the pico-8 custom characters as well as various fonts (bitmap and regular anti-aliased fonts). Check the BBS thread here.

How to install the font(s):

• Linux: copy the files on ~/.fonts and sudo fc-cache -f -v
• Windows: copy the files on c:/windows/fonts/

Hacks - undocumented PICO-8 features

• Mouse - How to retrieve mouse coordinates (with demo).
• p8keyboard.js - Javascript "keyboard adapter" for the Pico-8. Send ASCII characters to a Pico-8 program running in a browser.
• SFX Modifications - Four effects that can only be applied by modifying memory (with demo).
• Tracker State/Audio Memory Locations - How to access and modify audio data as it is playing.

Hardware

• GameShell - A modular handheld game console that allows you to play & modify retro games and DIY new devices. Check the GameShell Docs for how to run PICO-8 on the GameShell.
• PocketChip - A handheld designed for playing and coding anywhere. Officially supported by pico-8. PoketChip version of pico-8

Articles & Posts

• Indie Retro News - A great introduction to PICO-8 by @ABrugsch.

Talks

• Sharing the love - Making games with PICO-8. linux conf au 2017 - Hobart, Australia

Clones

• TIC-80 by Nesbox - Tiny Computer, available on HTML 5, Windows, Linux 32/64bit, Android & MacOSX
• PicoLove - Pico-8 Reimplementation in LÖVE.
• LIKO-12 - An open source fantasy computer made using LÖVE with 96kb RAM.
• Pikuseru - Open Source Fantasy Console in pure Rust [Core].
• tac08 - tac08 is an emulation of the runtime part of the Pico-8 fantasy console, running on RG350 handheld game console.
• LowRes NX - Fantasy Console available on IOS, MacOS, Windows, Linux, and GameShell (BASIC code support)

I Want to Contribute!

Great! :smiley:

Please, read the contribution guidelines first.

License

To the extent possible under law, Felipe Bueno has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.

See LICENSE for more