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PICO-8 User Manual

PICO-8 v0.2.4c
https://www.pico-8.com
(c) Copyright 2014-2022 Lexaloffle Games LLP
Author: Joseph White // [email protected]

PICO-8 is built with:

• SDL2 http://www.libsdl.org
• Lua 5.2 http://www.lua.org // see license.txt
• ws281x by jgarff // see license.txt
• GIFLIB http://giflib.sourceforge.net/
• WiringPi http://wiringpi.com/
• libb64 by Chris Venter
• miniz by Rich Geldreich

Latest version of this manual (as html, txt) and other resources:

https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php?page=resources

Welcome to PICO-8

PICO-8 is a fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other computer programs. When you turn it on, the machine greets you with a shell for typing in Lua programs and provides simple built-in tools for creating sprites, maps and sound.

The harsh limitations of PICO-8 are carefully chosen to be fun to work with, encourage small but expressive designs and hopefully to give PICO-8 cartridges their own particular look and feel.

Specifications

component	description
Display	128x128, fixed 16 colour palette
Input	6-button controllers
Carts	32k data encoded as png files
Sound	4 channel, 64 definable chip blerps
Code	Lua (max 8192 tokens of code)
Sprites	Single bank of 128 8x8 sprites (+128 shared)
Map	128x32 8-bit cells (+128x32 shared)