Pico-8 Fantasy console porting to LuckFox Lyra Linux

I would love to see this ported to pico calc i am sure it can be done.

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probably not as pico-8 requires some OS to run as it emulates hardware.

if you want to run it on hardware itself it won’t be fantasy console anymore :slight_smile:

but you can run in linux with alternative board: Luckfox Lyra on PicoCalc - #8 by hisptoot

Yea i have that board on the way too. This is probaly going to be the board i use the most. So i hope someone can get it working.

if you want portable properly working pico-8 I can highly recommend uconsole, it’s quite good for this purpose.

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I have tested that in the past i agree its the fun of getting it to work on pico calc.

You can run the official raspberry pi version of pico8_dyn on luckfox lyra.

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Considering Pico-8 is closed source, the only way to run the official version is to use something compatible with the official platforms:

Luckily, as hisptoot pointed out, the Raspberry Pi version can work on the Lyra.

There are quite a few open source reverse engineered versions of Pico-8, but none of them are fully compatible with Pico-8 and they all have their issues.

From what I’ve seen, Fake-08 is one of the more compatible (it even has a libretro core), but it’s also incredibly inefficient in how it supports the audio, and it can’t run full speed on slower devices unless sound is off. Pemsa is also highly compatible but I don’t think they really target underpowered devices. Retro8 is one of the oldest Pico-8 emulators, and hasn’t been updated for a long time, is lacking many features, and is only compatible with the oldest and simplest Pico-8 carts though it’s fast and it also has a libretro core.

PicoPico seems to be abandoned, but was an attempt to make a Pico-8 emulator for the Pico, which became impractical, so they targeted ESP32 devices instead. Since it’s unfinished, it lacks most audio, and it’s not very compatible with Pico-8 carts, but it might still be a good starting point or reference if someone wanted to get something running on a ESP32 (or was foolhardy enough to try again on the Pico).

There are probably others, but most were experimental and abandoned or stalled.

@hisptoot already got the official Raspberry Pi port of Pico-8 working on the Lyra, but it was somewhat slow, perhaps due to the display.

Realistically, the PicoCalc doesn’t really have good gaming controls for the Pico-8 anyway. It would still be cool to see it running full speed with sound, but I’m guessing only certain games would be comfortably playable. It might be more interesting with a bluetooth gamepad, which might be possible with wireless added to the Lyra. But it seems like this might just be a fun tech demo rather than a useful port. Maybe that will change, but I wouldn’t count on it. (The Gameshell would probably be a better choice for Pico-8 instead, as it already runs Pico-8 fullspeed for all but the most intensive games.)

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