this is where i dump my less good cartridges
i am doing this
i gave up on PICO-8 years ago when i buyed it since i got overwhelmed fast.
now i rediscovered PICO-8 and wanted to try it again, so i did.
this is my first PICO-8 cartridge i ever made.
i wanted to make this 'special edition' cartridge since i rediscovered PICO-8 with the making of 'Welcome!' (previous section), so this happened:
when i watched this talk about PICO-8 that i found on the lexaloffle.com PICO-8 resources page, @zep explained how data is stored in PICO-8 cartridges:
> all of the data is stored in the Red Green Blue data bits,
> it's encoded in the low bits of the RGBA channels
so i made this cartridge by recoloring the original cartridge (previous section) with the paint bucket tool in Pixelorama.
since he didn't say how many of the low bits of the RGBA channels are used, i found out myself:
in my first attempt, i recolored the cartridge while keeping only the lowest bit the same as before:
i stopped halfway through to test if the cartridge would load in PICO-8, and the cart was corrupted.
so glad that i saved it as 'welcome_special-edition.p8.png' and didn't overwrite the original 'welcome.p8.png' — although if i did overwrite that cart, i could redownload it from this post (previous section).
in my second attempt, i tested loading and running the 'special edition' cart in PICO-8 very often, and i changed to leaving the lowest Two bits unchanged:
this time, even the finished version of the 'special edition' cart has unchanged PICO-8 data, but a different-looking shell. with roughly 1 to 2 hours of work in each of the 2 attempts, i did it.
to generate the color codes that i needed, i did this in each cycle of color-picking (as needed):
here is a comparison of the original cartridge with the new 'special edition':
so it's the same cartridge as before, but with a blue-green shell.
since making the special edition cartridge from before (previous section), i realized that i want to make more special edition cartridges soon. but i don't want to make them manually again because doing this manually is tedious.
so i am making a tool named 'Pico-8 cartridge special editioner'. i don't want to publish it yet since it's still too unstable — in the early testing phase after finishing the most basic version that works.
this tool is a User Interface with these steps:
here is a comparison of both special editions:
i used GIMP to overlay a gradient with too many colors on a cart's artwork. then i used my special editioner tool (explained in previous section) to make a working cart with it.
i did this to test how the impossible cover image would look like in splore.
the cover image degrades nicely, so thank you to whoever made sure that it's not possible to break PICO-8 with an overly colorful cartridge (and also @zep for making PICO-8 in the first place):
fun fact: the gradient in the cart's program is the same gradient, but degraded in GIMP and then copied by hand into PICO-8 for roughly five hours including breaks:
WEBP is a better image format than PNG and GIF, because it can store the same quality images in much smaller files.
i found that PICO-8 can save and load WEBP cartridges, but without the label image, and not as BBS carts:
i hope that PICO-8 will soon support WEBP cartridges in the same way as PNG cartridges