PICO-8 is a fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other computer programs. It feels like a regular console, but runs on Windows / Mac / Linux. When you turn it on, the machine greets you with a commandline, a suite of cartridge creation tools, and an online cartridge browser called SPLORE. - r/pico8 / Showcase / online / v0.2.6d / awesome-PICO-8 / discord

by zep lexaloffle / mastodon / twitter

• Discovering PICO-8 - blog-code
• Pico-view
  • hardware: Game Dev Extras

see also

• Keyconfig - Opens the interactive key configuration tool.
• folder - open pico8 cards folder

IDE

see Using VS Code with PICO-8

Emulator

• fake-08 - A Pico 8 player for homebrew consoles.
• tac08 - takes a .p8 (text format) Pico-8 cart file and runs it closely as possible to the real Pico-8 software.

Hardware for virtual console

• Pico-8 on Retro Handhelds (RG351P/M/V, GameForce, RGB10 Max, and more)
  • rgb-30
  • Guide: Pico-8 on Retro Handheld Devices
  • anbernic
• Pico Pico - Project to attempt to create hardware for the Pico-8.

an idealized constrained modern day game maker - [HN]

Specifications

Display: 128x128, fixed 16 colour palette
Input: 6-button controllers
Carts: 32k data encoded as png files
Sound: 4 channel, 64 definable chip blerps
Code: P8 Lua (max 8192 tokens of code)
CPU: 4M vm insts/sec
Sprites: Single bank of 128 8x8 sprites (+128 shared)
Map: 128 x 32 Tilemap (+ 128 x 32 shared)

For comparison,
Atari 2600 hardware:
Maximum resolution: 160 x 192 pixels (NTSC) Playfield resolution: 40 x 192 pixels

Intellivision
resolution: 159×96, 16 color palette, two colors per tile

Collecovision
display: 256 by 192 full color pixels per screen

see also

• pico-view
• Picotron Playground - The Future of Pico-8 ?
• TIC-80 - a free and open source fantasy computer for making, playing and sharing tiny games.
• Runty8 - A Pico8 clone in Rust.
• retro8 - open source reimplementation of PICO-8

Versions

• PICO-8 0.2.7 - 2025-08-16
• PICO-8 0.2.6 - 2024-02-28 - RELEASE OVERVIEW
• PICO-8 0.2.5g - 2023-02-03
• PICO-8 0.2.5d - 2022-12-13
• PICO-8 0.2.5 - 2022-08-28 - RELEASE OVERVIEW
  • built in Help: > help fillp
• PICO-8 0.2.4c - 2022-04-10
• PICO-8 0.2.4b - 2022-01-27
• PICO-8 0.2.4 - 2021-12-03 - RELEASE OVERVIEW
• PICO-8 0.2.3 - 2021-09-06
• PICO-8 0.2.2b - 2021-03-03
• PICO-8 0.2.2 - 2021-02-15 - RELEASE OVERVIEW
• PICO-8 0.2.1 - 2020-07-04 - RELEASE OVERVIEW
• PICO-8 0.2 - 2020-05-08 - RELEASE OVERVIEW
  • Frame Advance - can be used to debug
• PICO-8 0.1.11 - 2017-11-09 - feature complete
  • Binary Exporters - PICO-8 can now generate stand-alone, distributable binary versions of carts and multicarts for Windows, MacOS and 64-bit Linux
  • tabs “–>8”
  • SFX Instruments
  • Fill Patterns
  • Commandline Scripts - run carts as part of commandline tool chains.
• PICO-8 0.1.10 - 2016-12-07
• PICO-8 0.1.9b - 2016-10-06
• PICO-8 0.1.8 - 2016-06-26
  • Button Glyphs - Shift + U D L R O X.
• PICO-8 0.1.6 - 2016-04-17
• PICO-8 0.1.5 - 2016-02-05
  • KEYCONFIG to configure buttons
• PICO-8 0.1.4 - 2016-02-05
• PICO-8 0.1.3 - 2015-10-15
• PICO-8 0.1.2 - 2015-10-02
• PICO-8 0.1.1 - 2015-06-11