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Comment by tooltower | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know of an open-source version of PICO-8? I don't even care about any of the features, as long as there's an active community around the project.

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TIC-80 is a (somewhat similar) fantasy console that is open-source. https://tic80.com/

You should checkout WASM4⁽¹⁾, an Open Source WebAssembly-based fantasy console with 4 colors and a 160x160 screen.

One of its advantages over TIC-80 is that you can program games in any language that compiles to WebAssembly. The games are tiny pure Wasm "carts" that can run on any Wasm runtime, from the browser to Nintendo 3DS.

[1] https://wasm4.org

An alternative open source fantasy console is TIC 80: https://tic80.com

To all the sibling repliers: PICO-8, TIC-80, Load81 and probably others are somewhat Lua oriented. What is it about Lua that makes it so popular in this area?

Its small footprint goes well with those kinds of platform constraints and it’s a pretty expressive language.

There is the Nim-based Nico:

https://github.com/ftsf/nico

That's not really a fantasy console though -- it's just a framework for making games. What makes a "fantasy console" like Pico-8 or Tic-80 is that it is an entire environment that you develop and run your code in, as if it were an emulator of a system, albeit one that never actually existed.

Tic-80 is what you are looking for.

LOAD81 could probably use some eyeballs:

https://github.com/antirez/load81.git

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