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 - RELEASE OVERVIEW
  • round rect - defined as (w,h) instead of (x1,y1) - use twice the cpu as regular rect
  • text outline - twice as fast as legacy way of doing it
  • test underline
• 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
  • Sprite
    • Sprite animation Ctrl-L set start then end - U / W cycle within range Work aslso on big sprite
    • paste big Ctrl-B
    • activate Grid Ctrl-G
    • print ctrl code
  • Map in different place
  • Save url - a url embeding your code
  • Label for cart
  • custom font - variable width
  • Map Editor
    • move & edit in selection without erasing what’s under it - by using the cursor key
  • String are array now
  • Char wrap
  • TLINE ??
• 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
  • 64ko Memory
  • Video Remapping - The video memory sections can now be mapped to each other, allowing the screen to be used as if it were the spritesheet, and/or to draw to the spritesheet as if it were the screen.
  • Big Maps - This feature doesn’t come with extra cartridge space to match! So to use 0x8000 and above, you’ll need to manually mset() or memcpy() some map data. This feature will be most useful for carts that procedurally generate their maps or have some custom data storage scheme.
  • P8SCII - character data can be specified and printed in-line using “\^.” followed by 8 bytes of raw binary data
• 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