Picotron

March 20, 2024 | Tags: personal programming picotron

Picotron came out just a couple days ago, and I’ve been having a lot of fun playing with it. It’s a lot like Pico-8, but it’s much more powerful in many ways. It has a full desktop you can use, so not only can you create games, but you can create tools, utilities, screensavers, and wallpapers to use within Picotron. One thing I really like about it over Pico-8 is the size of the font. I always had a really hard time making anything in Pico-8 because the font hurts my eyes to look at after a while. I made a python script that splits a .p8 file into its component parts so that I could edit it outside Pico-8. But with Picotron, I don’t need to do that for two reasons: one is that extracting a .p64 into its component parts is fully supported by Picotron^[1], so I wouldn’t actually need to make a script; the second is that the font doesn’t hurt my eyes!

Yesterday, web exports were made available, so I’m going to embed the carts I’ve made over the last week.

Mobile Users Please Read

From what I can tell, the Picotron web exports don't really work well on mobile. If you want to try out these carts, you should probably do it on a desktop.

DVD Screensaver #

This was the first thing I made in Picotron, because I felt like it would be a pretty easy project to make. I didn’t even realize that Picotron supports custom screensavers at that point!

load #r01dvd

A Picotron cartridge of a DVD screensaver that bounces across the screen. When it hits an edge, it changes color. Sometimes it changes to a trans pride flag instead.

Picotron Utilities #

I made a bunch of small commandline utilities to make using the terminal a little nicer. I won’t go too indepth here (most of the info is in the README), but my favorites are tree (which displays a tree structure of the file), and grep (which lets you search a file, or recursively search a directory).

Wordle #

Wordle is exactly what it says: a clone of wordle. It uses the official wordle wordlist, and it uses an invisible text editor GUI widget to let you type. One thing I am a little worried about is the fact that it’s windowed in the web export. Most of the projects I’ve done in Pico-8 were for LowRezJam, which requires a 64x64 resolution. I’m thinking about using Picotron instead of Pico-8 for LRJ this year, but if there’s no way to scale up a 64x64 window to be full screen, that would be unfortunate.

load #wordle

A Picotron cartridge with a playable game of wordle.

Mastodon #

This is a very basic, proof of concept Mastodon client for Picotron. Picotron lets you make an HTTP get request, using the fetch() function. This cartridge can fetch a single status, given an instance and status ID. I’m not embedding it here because on my test, it seems to crash when running it on the web. But I will link to my BBS post about it if you want to try it out.

load #r01mastodon

Pipes #

I think this one might be my favorite of the one’s I’ve made so far. It’s a pipe screensaver, where pipes are created at random positions along the edge of the screen and snake out across the screen in random patterns. It’s really fun to stare at!

load #pipes

A Picotron cartridge with a pipe screensaver. Pipes of various colors are coming on screen and bending around in random directions, creating a sprawling pipe network.

Footnotes #

.p64 and .p64.png files are treated as folders within Picotron, even though they are actually files. So if you do cp cart.p64 cart, it will extract the files from the .p64 cart into a folder! Likewise, if you do the opposite (cp cart cart.p64), it will combine that folder’s contents into a cart. ↩︎