I spent today making a #pico8 wiki present for you all: a fully spec’d P8SCII character table, and enhanced P8SCII control code documentation! lmk what you think! (/cc @lexaloffle @Liquidream)

pico-8.fandom.com/wiki/P8SCII

Here’s the control codes page. Needs more on fonts and poking default attributes; right now it’s just copied from the official manual.

pico-8.fandom.com/wiki/P8SCII_Co…

This includes original research (if you can call it that) on how P8SCII maps to Unicode. Extremely handy for entering high char literals in the editor, using an external editor on .p8 files, etc. I will be adding a programmatic version of this table to picotool.

I’m especially interested in feedback on how I describe the Japanese characters. Everything I know about Japanese lettering I learned from my teenage son and Wikipedia. (Thanks to him for reviewing a draft of this.)

OK I took a polish and feedback pass on these and fleshed out the font and default sections. Also repaired the bottom margin on the code samples site-wide. Enjoy!

New discovery: PICO-8 uses variation selector 16 (U+FE0F) with the Unicode emoji symbols for down, left, right, up, and “O” (but not “X”). I noted this in the wiki. pico-8.fandom.com/wiki/P8SCII

I’m a little confused why VSCode and iTerm won’t render the emoji version of Black Rightwards Arrow as it does with the other arrows, but the selector is there. Browsers show it fine (such as in the wiki).

picotool now has a lookup table and conversion routines for .p8 Unicode. It does this conversion invisibly when loading and saving .p8 files. github.com/dansanderson/p…

Note: high chars in identifiers not yet supported! Doing that next. #pico8

picotool now supports high chars in identifiers and labels. Also luamin renames labels correctly. Also luamin preserves the btn symbol built-ins.

Also picotool’s issues list is down to one page in length!

(Originally posted to Twitter on August 31, 2021. It received 63 likes and 11 retweets.)