Homebrew Question Pico-8 via LayeredFS?

[stinkoman]

Celeste includes a port of the original Pico-8 version with the Switch release. Has anyone poked around in there to see if it's rewritten from scratch or still running on a ported Pico-8? Presumably with LayeredFS rapidly taking off that'd make launching other Pico-8 games possible.

 

[OkazakiTheOtaku]

Does Celeste have a physical version? If not, we don't really have public stuff to dump digital titles right now.

 

[rsn8887]

It looks like a full blown pico-8 emulator or port to me. Can this be looked at by someone with more filesystem knowledge? Maybe it can be hacked with Edizon to allow us to run other pico-8 carts?

 

[Deleted User]

you must know if its an Emulator or an Port

 

[Der_Blockbuster]

It's very likely written from scratch.

 

[hippy dave]

AFAIK the pico-8 author allowed the engine to be used in the game, so it's an official port. e: I'm wrong, see next post

Regarding using it to play other pico-8 games, I didn't get any clues from the romfs, so someone smarter than me probably needs to figure it out from the executable.

 

[Supergrom]

I'm not sure about how the pico 8 version was included in the commercial celeste release. I thought I remember hearing that they just ported it to whatever engine they built the commercial game in, but I can't find a source for that now.

If you're interested though, I've started porting PicoLove (a Pico 8 player for Love2d) to LovePotion (TurtleP's Love2d port for Switch), and celeste classic is playable on it as of right now. Haven't made a proper release yet though, and there are plenty of incompatibilities with other carts.

The repo is on Github if you search for "picolovepotion". Unfortunately, I can't post a link because I'm a brand new member.

EDIT: Celeste classic was indeed ported. Found the source in the Reddit AMA that they did: (but once again, can't post a link...)

The code for the original PICO-8 was only about 2000 lines I think, so I just went line-by-line and converted the LUA into C#, adding wrapper methods for the PICO-8 functionality. It was only about a day of work.

Also yeah, I love prototyping and experimenting in small engines like PICO-8. Obviously for certain types of games it wont work, but in general it's fun and can often help you figure out if an idea feels good or not.​

 

[hippy dave]

I'm not sure about how the pico 8 version was included in the commercial celeste release. I thought I remember hearing that they just ported it to whatever engine they built the commercial game in, but I can't find a source for that now.

If you're interested though, I've started porting PicoLove (a Pico 8 player for Love2d) to LovePotion (TurtleP's Love2d port for Switch), and celeste classic is playable on it as of right now. Haven't made a proper release yet though, and there are plenty of incompatibilities with other carts.

The repo is on Github if you search for "picolovepotion". Unfortunately, I can't post a link because I'm a brand new member.

Sounds good! Link: https://github.com/jtothebell/picolovepotion

 

[rsn8887]

I see. Well the controls will also be an issue for some games. AFAIK many pico-8 games assume a keyboard is present. So different games map controls to different keyboard keys.

IMO this was a really big oversight in the pico-8 specs: it assumes there's always a full keyboard available.

Also pico-8 is closed source. So if we want 100% compatibility we have to wait until the original author decides to port it. Which is probably never, judging by the state of the Android port.