PICO-8 User Manual

Original English

PICO-8 User Manual

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
z8lua by Sam Hocevar https://github.com/samhocevar/z8lua

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

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:    P8 Lua (max 8192 tokens of code) 
CPU:     4M vm insts/sec
Sprites: Single bank of 128 8x8 sprites (+128 shared)
Map:     128 x 32 Tilemap (+ 128 x 32 shared)