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nesbox / TIC-80

TIC-80 is a fantasy computer for making, playing and sharing tiny games.
https://tic80.com
MIT License
5.06k stars 492 forks source link

Physical Cartridge Support Plans? #858

Open 0xvividmirage opened 5 years ago

0xvividmirage commented 5 years ago

Are there any plans to make it so we could "burn" these software games onto some physical cartridge like Nintendo Switch, Game Boy, etc? I'm not sure what would be involved and am not suggesting you start adding proprietary junk. I am just interested in your perspective on this topic.

nesbox commented 5 years ago

Heh, before adding physical carts support we should develop physical TIC80 device to insert carts into :)

0xvividmirage commented 5 years ago

This can be a goal :) We can design a shell that can hold a Raspberry Pi or similar and use like NFC data transfer or SD cards to game a game cartridge.

I was talking more along the lines of if I wanted to make my game in the TIC-80 but "port it" so I can run it on a Game boy, etc. Thoughts?

RobLoach commented 5 years ago

TIC-80 has been added to Lakka: https://github.com/libretro/Lakka-LibreELEC/blob/master/packages/libretro/tic80/package.mk

You could mock up a TIC-80 distro with just the TIC-80 core on it: https://github.com/libretro/Lakka-LibreELEC/tree/master/distributions

I believe there's some work somewhere to have media that's mounted auto-load in Lakka. I'll do some searching on that.

The libretro core doesn't provide the TIC-80 console though, so it would be pretty cool to have the full TIC-80 launch.

msx80 commented 5 years ago

It would be fun :) i once designed a mame box with an nfc reader and games were on nfc cards that you could swap in and out. Only the id was stored, since nfc cards can only store a bunch of bytes, actual games were all on the sd. Quite fun nonetheless. I'm planning to make a physical tic80 but i think i'll just rely on Surf to start games.

0xvividmirage commented 5 years ago

I actually think the 1KB limit (as of today) has really cool potential for retro gaming as a limit that inspires clever game development. I know the games would be really tiny and simple but I believe the whole point of having a physical system is that each game is also on a physical device as well -- not "unlocked" by a dongle.

msx80 commented 5 years ago

Uh 1k is really too small for me :) but you're right on the game actually being contained in the media vs being unlocked. Perhaps a special enclosure for an sd card, to make a cartridge, would do it. Otherwise there's usb mass storage to use

0xvividmirage commented 5 years ago

1k is a great challenge. I accept! :smiling_imp: