EmulatorResources/PICO8

Table of contents

How to generate the executable file
Movie submissions

PICO-8 is a virtual machine and game engine created by Lexaloffle Games. It is a fantasy video game console that mimics the limited graphical and sound capabilities of 8-bit systems of the 1980s.

PICO-8 application can run games and it can convert them to a standalone executable, whose Linux version works well in libTAS. Some developers release executable files for each platform, and some games you have to convert yourself.

How to generate the executable file

Open the PICO-8 client
Type FOLDER
Drop the gamename.p8.png file for the game on this folder (replace gamename with what your game is actually called) and close the dialog
Type LOAD gamename.p8.png
Type EXPORT gamename.bin to generate the standalone executables
Launch gamename.bin/linux/gamename from libTAS

Config path, in case you need it, is ~/.lexaloffle/pico-8/config.txt.

Movie submissions

We allow submissions using PICO-8 with libTAS. Please follow these guidelines to ensure your movie is acceptable and can be synced:

Follow all rules already in place for submitting libTAS movies.

Make sure you use the latest version of PICO-8! This a commercial software with closed source code. Only the latest version is available for download for license holders and older ones are not officially archived. Failure to do so could render your movie forever impossible to sync.

Make sure your movie starts with no save data! Having your own save data present may cause desyncs when other people try to run your movie. To delete your save data, clear the ~/.lexaloffle/pico-8/cdata/ directory.

When making a libTAS movie that you plan to submit to TASVideos or upload it to userfiles, put Platform: PICO8 (no hyphen) at the very start of the movie annotations, that way the site will recognize your platform properly.

In your description or movie annotations, please provide the following:
- libTAS version
- PICO-8 version
- Filename and MD5 hash of your .png (use md5sum yourgame.png in a terminal)
- Config variable foreground_sleep_ms can cause desyncs if the value doesn't match on different machines, so provide it as a part of sync info to be safe.