Description:
Amico8 is a PICO-8 fantasy console emulator for Amiga computers with a
68020 or better processor. It loads and runs PICO-8 cartridges in
both text (.p8) and image (.p8.png) format directly from the Amiga
file system.
Project status:
Amico8 is almost finished. A baseline of roughly 1100 cartridges has
been tested, and 100% of them launch and start playing - with the
AOT/JIT native compiler ON just as with it OFF. Audio support is
at about 90%: all waveforms, the note effects and the music sequencer
are in place, with a few timbres still being tuned to match real
PICO-8 more closely. Bear in mind that "it launches" is not the same
as "bug-free" - while you are actually playing, an individual cart can
still reveal glitches, and a few very memory-heavy carts can run the
Amiga out of RAM. These are being fixed as they turn up.
Features:
- Runs the vast majority of PICO-8 cartridges (.p8 and .p8.png)
- Full 128x128 pixel display, 2x scaled to 256x256 via Amiga copper tricks
- 16-colour PICO-8 palette mapped to Amiga 12-bit hardware palette
- Joystick (port 2) and keyboard input
- Mouse support (port 1) for carts that use mouse API
- Paula audio: all 8 PICO-8 waveforms (triangle, tilted-saw, saw, square,
pulse, organ, noise, phaser) plus the buzz/noiz timbre variants, the note
effects (slide, vibrato, drop, fade in/out, arpeggio) and custom instruments
- Serial PCM streaming - serial(0x808) digitised audio for carts with
sampled speech or music (Berzerk, Impossible Mission, Amstrad chip tunes)
- AOT (Ahead-of-Time) native m68k code compiler - ON by default for a
noticeably faster emulator (switch it off in the launcher, or with the
NOAOT CLI option, if a particular cart misbehaves under it)
- Multi-cart support: load() chains between cartridges (e.g. POOM, The Mind)
- BBS cart browser: browse and download cartridges from the Lexaloffle BBS
directly from the Amiga (requires AmiSSL + bsdsocket.library)
- GUI launcher
Two executables are provided:
Amico8 - 68020/030 version, no FPU required.
Runs on any Amiga with a 68020 or better.
Amico8_040 - 68040/060 version, optimised instruction scheduling.
Recommended for 040/060 systems.
Recommended processor: 68060.
Usage:
Amico8 - start with GUI! (recommended)
or from CLI:
Amico8 CART=<cartridge.p8.png>
Amico8 ? (show all CLI options)
Controls:
Joystick port 2 / cursor keys - d-pad (btn 0..3)
Z / Y / C / Alt (or fire 1) - O button (btn 4)
X / Ctrl (or fire 2) - X button (btn 5)
Enter - open / close pause menu
P - freeze (debug pause)
F4 - jump to the previous cart *
F5 - jump to a random cart *
F6 - jump to the next cart *
ESC - return to launcher
* F4/F5/F6 work only when started from the GUI launcher (they
step through the launcher's games-folder list). A short
"now loading <name>" splash shows which cart was picked
(press ESC during it to drop back to the launcher instead).
When you return to the launcher, the selection lands on the
cart you were last playing - including one reached via F4/F5/F6.
Limitations:
- Some newer PICO-8 API calls may not be implemented
- Serial PCM (digitised) audio plays on a single Paula channel, so while a
cart streams it the PCM comes out of one speaker (mono); the synth timbre
is close to but not bit-exact with real PICO-8
- On chipset (planar) Workbench, launching multiple carts back-to-back
in one Amico8 session may eventually freeze the Amiga (chip-RAM
fragmentation across iterations). If this happens, restart Amico8.
---
Tested games:
Over 1100 tested PICO-8 cartridges now launch and run - 100% of them, with
the AOT/JIT native compiler ON just as well as with it OFF - and the large
majority already play correctly.
Release 0.9 turns the AOT native-code compiler ON by default for a noticeably
faster emulator (it can be switched off per session if a cart misbehaves under
it), and brings a major audio overhaul: corrected music playback, real custom
instruments, accurate note pitches across the whole range, and click-free note
transitions. On top of that it adds a broad batch of graphics, API and
cart-switching robustness fixes - building on the 0.8 compatibility work across
the z8lua parser, number/string handling, P8SCII text controls, fill-pattern
glyphs, configurable screen modes, the real date/time stats and the rounded
graphics primitives.
---
Code used:
Lua 5.2 - scripting engine base
Copyright (C) 1994-2015 Lua.org, PUC-Rio
Authors: R. Ierusalimschy, L. H. de Figueiredo, W. Celes
License: MIT (http://www.lua.org/license.html)
The Lua VM and standard libraries form the core of the interpreter.
z8lua - PICO-8-compatible Lua fork (from the Zepto-8 project)
Copyright (C) 2016-2024 Sam Hocevar <sam@hocevar.net>
License: WTFPL (http://www.wtfpl.net/)
Source: https://github.com/samhocevar/zepto8
z8lua extends Lua 5.2 with PICO-8-specific syntax (short-if, compound
assignment operators, integer division, fix32 number type, PICO-8 math
functions). The file z8lua/lpico8lib.c is taken directly from Zepto-8.
p8_compress - PICO-8 cartridge decompression
Copyright (C) 2014-2022 Lexaloffle Games LLP
License: MIT
Decompresses PICO-8 Lua source code from both old ":c:" format and
modern "pxa" compressed format.
stb_image - PNG image loader
Author: Sean Barrett
License: MIT / Public Domain
Source: https://github.com/nothings/stb
Used for loading .p8.png cartridge images.
FAKE-08 - reference PICO-8 implementation
Author: Jonathan (jtothebell)
License: MIT
Source: https://github.com/jtothebell/fake-08
A HUGE thank-you here. FAKE-08's source was by far the most
valuable reference in this whole project - over and over it was
what let us pin down exactly how PICO-8 really behaves: API
semantics, the audio synthesis model, iterator and metatable
edge cases, the fill-pattern glyph values, the _update_buttons
contract, music-pattern timing, and countless smaller details
were all settled by reading it. Many bugs would have taken days
longer (or stayed unsolved) without it. Not a single line of
FAKE-08 is in the Amico8 binary - it was only consulted during
development - but its clarity made this port possible. Thank you,
Jonathan.
---
Thanks:
Kempy/Veezya, MWB113, Tytus, Paluch - testing
Quad, OlekW200i, Wozik, Mirq, Borsuk - moral support
Jonathan (jtothebell) - FAKE-08 reference implementation
---
Pawel "Juen" Nowak
Contact: j@ki.je or via imp3!
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