Making fifty TIC-80 carts in a weekend | Hacker News Reader

Making fifty TIC-80 carts in a weekend

blinry.org

139 pointsmemorable23 comments

I made so much of these when I was coding intros/demos on the Amiga then on the PC! The one looking like Lorenz attractors (16) of course. And the Moire pattern (43): I coded that on the Amiga and wondered "wait, does this work if I add perspective?"... And of course interference patterns do work in 3D too, so I hacked a little something and it looked a bit like a DJ was scratching vinyls.

I dig the "TEST" (41) one: that TIC thing looks like a fun little fantasy computer!

The "floating letters" one (15) brings back memories of the tiny cracktros some pirated games or pirate BBS had (many of us were sailing the high seas as kids, aye!)

An interesting thing about "[A lot of] [thing] in [short time]" challenges is that you get a lot of opportunities to learn what processes can be stripped away and different ways to compromise. Great way to break out of a rut or block because you have to learn what's stopping you and what's essential to you.

I quickly skimmed over these results and saw at least one case of "this thing was complicated, so I did this other thing instead" and one "I tried to do that thing, but my failure resulted in this thing". The goal was to make 50 carts so these are both perfectly valid strategies to achieve it.

If you liked this fantasy console approach, you should also check https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php, it is not OSS, but have really great community and support.

I saw Pico8 a while ago and really liked it! Now I'm trying to make it "real", by creating a physical console that implements the API: https://github.com/DavidVentura/PicoPico

It's heavily incomplete, but it runs "Celeste" on an ESP32. Some small games also run in the Raspberry Pico (RP2040), but it does not have enough RAM for medium-large games.

Cool project!

Hi @deivid, I've been following your project for a while, and would like to collaborate. I am working on a similar Game console project and working on adding support for fantasy console support Pico8 or Tic80. https://github.com/codetiger/GameTiger-Console

Sure! Feel free to message me in github or via email.

I've abandoned my Pico8 on RP2040 port though, a lot of games simply need more memory than there's available. There's this crazy guy: https://github.com/yocto-8/yocto-8/blob/main/doc/extmem.md that managed to get external RAM over SPI working (RP2040 does not support memory remapping)

On ESP32 with SPIRAM (/PSRAM) Pico8 is definitely achievable, and _most_ games will run at a playable frame rate, but some won't; as an example "Rockets!", does too many calculations per frame to run smoothly, and the Lua overhead starts showing so I'm exploring ideas like an optimizing compiler that can run off-console, etc.

I don't thing TIC-80 will be doable, the constraints are significantly more relaxed. A Pico8 framebuffer is 32KB; in TIC-80 it is 64KB (and this doubles with buffering/DMA) but most importantly, code is no longer something simple like Lua

This is fantastic. I've made a Game Boy emulator in the past, and I'm a big fan of Pico-8, so maybe I'll give this a try myself as a learning project. I wasn't aware this was really feasible.

If anybody is interested in a curated list of cool PICO-8 carts, here’s a post with my favorites:

https://memalign.github.io/p/pico8.html

Snowfight! I remember that from way back.

The source code appears to be inside the .tic files, after a short binary header.

To save you some time, if you can't figure out the controls for some demos, try the scroll wheel. You can also press Esc inside demos and get some kind of menu.

OMG this is so inspiring. Reminds me of early high school days when I’d fire up Turbo Pascal on my 486DX2/66 and play around with the VGA.

It seems like it’s easy to get the creative juices flowing with the TIC-80. Kudos to the author!

I adore TIC-80. I discovered it last August at a time when I was burned out and no longer programming for fun and it gives me the same sense of wonder and power as sitting down at QBasic.

I love fantasy consoles like Pico-8 and Tic-80 (and all the various others). I haven't done too much with TIC-80 as I ironically find the less restrictive restraints compared to Pico-8 harder for me to work with. It's almost easier to get started when you have 8x8 sprites, a 128x128 screen and only 16 colors. Once you lessen those restrictions it can be more daunting.

Nice one! This shows how cool it is to practice on a constrained very immediate playground.

I'm really impressed with 22. The font is so cool

That’s the built-in font, you can get it here: https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/1388526/tic-80-wi...

I love the uses of random noise here to create texture and shading at the same time.