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⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
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A response to ew0k's thoughts and questions about Pico-8 and TIC-80 from a non-programmer perspective.
Pico-8 was my introduction to fantasy consoles like these and it came through the PocketCHIP handheld computer. Every PocketCHIP came with a copy of Pico 8 installed and it was a really fun way to play some retro-style games on that rad geeky portable computer. It wasn't until quite a bit later that I learned about other fantasy consoles but they are something I find really cool and fun even as someone who just likes playing games and doesn't program anything. The result of the hard artificial limits is that there is a pretty rapid supply of all kinds of creative, silly, fun and occasionally impressively well done games to play. There are quite a few different fantasy consoles now but Pico-8 is still the top of the heap and I would estimate that TIC-80 is second most popular.
ew0k and many of you reading this are certainly much better equipped to judge which of these projects is the better choice for someone looking to code their own game. From my purely gamer perspective I hope for TIC-80 to catch up to Pico-8 in popularity because as a player of the games it is just easier to get TIC-80 on more systems and it's more flexible because of being open source. For example there is a TIC-80 libretro core that works perfectly so you can play TIC-80 carts within retroarch or anything else that uses libretro emulator cores on all kinds of different systems. This isn't the case with Pico-8. There are some projects that attempt to reverse engineer Pico-8 to make the carts playable with a libretro core but the compatibility is not very good at all in my experience so I don't bother with it.
But to answer ew0k's question about installing the carts within the TIC-80 program, yes there is a cart browser built in similar to Pico-8's splore. Another interesting feature of TIC-80 is that it can be compiled to run directly on bare metal on the Raspberry Pi effectively making it act kind of like a funky modern 8 bit computer system.
P.S. I keep a list of my favorite TIC-80 carts on my capsule if you're looking for some good games to play.