Rexcellent Games

So one day, I decided to open the source of all my PICO-8 carts. I threw away a lot of not finished carts, yet I still ended up with a big number of them. And I not only wanted to make the carts downloadable but also to make them previewable in the browser. The typical way to do that with PICO-8 is the following:

> LOAD cart.p8.png
> EXPORT index.html

Then zip index.html and index.js, etc etc. But you know, even doing that with 20 carts will take quite some time.

And I knew BBS has a way to run carts without exporting them. So after a small research, I found a small library on Github, that allowed me to do just that, yet it was outdated for 3 years.

The perspective of just throwing a cart into the directory near your script to automatically make it playable was too good.

I talked a tiny bit with zep, the creator of PICO-8 console, and I got it working. So may I introduce you, pico-player, a tiny library, to magically load .png carts without exporting them. Now, creating something like my cart gallery is a piece of cake!

You just add a <div> to your HTML code, throw a cart somewhere, and add a tiny drop of JS:

document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", function(event) {
  PicoPlayer('pico-container', 'cart.p8.png');
});

Note: the code must run on a server, or it will refuse to load the cart. Here is a simple server setup using python:

# If Python version is above is 3.X
python3 -m http.server
# If Python version is above is 2.X
python -m SimpleHTTPServer

It should appear on localhost:8000

Enjoy 🙂

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