[Lerc]

The PICO-8 is where the current trend for fantasy consoles began. There's a growing number of them (I'm making one myself). They all have slightly different areas of focus.

Some are scripting language based, some emulate CPUs. TIC-80 programs are "64KB of Lua or Moonscript or JavaScript". My own is 8-bit AVR (128k rom, 64k ram). Z80 seems a popular base as well.

[wooly_bully]

Celeste, which was released to rave reviews this past year for the Switch, started life as a PICO-8 game. I played it on the PICO-8 at first and was blown away!

Enjoy: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=2145

[krajzeg]

PICO-8 (and I assume, TIC-80 as well) are actually great for prototyping bigger game development projects - specifically due to its harsh constraints, which force a limited scope and sharp focus on the design.

I'm actually in the process of making SlipWays, a fast-paced 4X game for PC that started as a PICO-8 prototype (https://krajzeg.itch.io/slipways). A major reason for the tight game design of the game were the tight confines on the console.

[ZebraCakes]

I love SlipWays! It's really impressive that you crammed a game that deep into such a small system. That and Celeste were big inspirations to look into PICO-8 myself. Looking forward to the full release.

[rococode]

One of the coolest hidden easter eggs in the main release of Celeste is stumbling upon the little room with the PICO-8 version of the game (https://i.imgur.com/7iNbBNA.png). I didn't know PICO-8 was a thing, so imagine my surprise when I found an entire complete game built into the main game!

[shakna]

Do you know how it was ported to the Switch?

TIC-80 uses SDL, which doesn't have a working port (for the Switch) so far as I know.

[djur]

The commercial release of Celeste is a new game, written from scratch, implemented in C# (XNA/FNA/MonoGame). It includes a port of the original. I'm kind of curious if they actually wrote a PICO-8 emulator for that or just ported it to C#.

[barbs]

They have a Github repo with some of the source code up (mostly just stuff to do with character movement and control).

https://github.com/noelfb/celeste

Apparently it's based on this framework:

https://bitbucket.org/MattThorson/monocle-engine/src/default...

[AlyssaRowan]

They ported the PICO-8 version line by line to C#. Since there aren't that many lines, apparently it wasn't that hard.

[doppp]

There is an SDL port for the Switch but it's under NDA and you need to request access for it [1].

[1] https://twitter.com/icculus/status/981730137736712192

[theresistor]

There's an SDL port, but it can't be publicly distributed due to NDAs.

[TimTheTinker]

Boy, wouldn’t it be fun if there was a Z80-based retro console with an 8-bit color screen and easy access from modern machines (USB, etc)?

[FractalLP]

http://www.specnext.com/about/

[zokier]

Something like FAP80 maybe?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13438610

[gpdpocketer]

Amstrad CPC with a HxC card...

[lloeki]

To me it seems that trend started somewhere along with Notch's dcpu16 and assorted virtual hardware from 0x10c.

[rtpg]

Pico 8 and Voxatron (its predecessor/3d succesor) both predate the 0x10c experiment I believe.

[lloeki]

Hmm, I can only trace PICO-8 as far back as late 2014, while 0x10c happened in 2012. However Lexaloffle likes to label it, Voxatron is hardly a fantasy console, it's a voxel game engine (with fantasy console features retrofitted in later on).

[_b8r0]

That's interesting. I'm currently building a Chip-8 emulator using an Atmega1284, keypad and SSD1306.

What ram chip are you using? I've been looking at 23K640 but it's proving a nightmare to get running on a breadboard.

[tokyodude]

PICO-8’s limits are partly tbere to try to ensure all games run on all platforms at full speed including raspberry pi.

it can export a stand alone game for windows, macos, linux, and html5