Alone in Pico: Postmortem of a 3D demake | Hacker News Reader

Alone in Pico: Postmortem of a 3D demake

lexaloffle.com

83 pointsphoboslab15 comments

When they standardized what the Pico8's specs would be, I thought it was too underpowered for a whole slew of ideas, but since then I've been consistently proven wrong. Really impressive.

That is the funny thing about providing people with a lot of limitations for a longer time. What they get out of the 80s home computers well after the 80s was considered impossible by even the makers of those systems. People will find ways if they can shoot at the same (virtual) hardware for a long time.

For example https://www.google.com/amp/s/scalibq.wordpress.com/2015/04/1...

Link to blog instead of Google: https://scalibq.wordpress.com/2015/04/12/8088-mph-how-it-cam...

Nice! I recently got my PocketCHIP[0] which has PICO 8 on board and I'm working on some small projects when in on the go (airplanes mainly). Great to see what other people are doing; PICO-8 is nice to work with so far!

[0] https://getchip.com/pages/pocketchip

I got a Pocket CHIP recently too. I'm having lots of fun with the music tracker in PICO-8.

I just wish I could figure out a way to write chords that didn't take up three of the precious four channels! Makes you realise how impressive some of those 8-bit chip tunes really are.

>I just wish I could figure out a way to write chords that didn't take up three of the precious four channels!

As a semi-long-time tracker user (BTW, if you've got a gameboy or gameboy emulator, check out LSDJ. If you don't, try LGPT, which should work well on the pocketCHIP. They are both fantastic trackers) I can tell you the secret: arpeggios. You play several notes very rapidly (and I mean very rapidly) on a single channel. This is so common that most trackers have the capability to do so built in. In PICO-8's tracker, it's effects number 6 (arpeggio slow) and 7 (arpeggio fast).

Strangely, PICO-8's docs claim that it arpeggiates over groups of four notes. Typically, (in, for example, MilkyTracker), the effect command would be 0xy, where x and y are semitone offsets for the second two notes in the arpeggio, for a total of three. I am unsure how PICO-8's arpeggio works precisely, as I don't own it.

Thanks for this! Strangely, I had tried fx 6/7, but I was putting them over the existing chords, which was as ugly as it sounds! Guess I should RTFM :D

FYI: Picochip (well Chip itself) got upgrade where 3D acceleration is now possible (thought this not affect Pico-8). My picochip also got from 4GB -> 8GB storage with that recent upgrade.

>Picochip

Did you mean PocketCHIP? https://getchip.com/pages/pocketchip

Yes :) At least I ddin't write it out as Nanochip

They also have a console kit version for $29 apparently.

https://getchip.com/pages/chip

This is incredible. These types of posts are some of my favorite ones that appear on HN.

Pico looks promising.

Pocketchip is one of the few products I couldn't see myself buying, but would love to receive as a gift.

You can buy Pico-8 separately if you want, it works on Windows, Mac, Linux, Raspberry Pi and of course Pocketchip.

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