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I think Pico-8 tries to capture the spirit of 8-bit computing more than the reality. The most popular 8-bit computers came with a BASIC, and many home users (me

I think Pico-8 tries to capture the spirit of 8-bit computing more than the reality. The most popular 8-bit computers came with a BASIC, and many home users (me at the time included) programmed that to move some sprites around, and never really went into assembly language. Lua seems more inspired by BASIC than most modern languages, so Pico-8 feels like coding for a very friendly 8-bit computer with an ultra-high-powered BASIC. But it doesn't really simulate an actual CPU that this BASIC interpreter would run on.

AstralStorm 4y ago
Interestingly enough the machines PICO-8 is inspired by can pull of way amazing things that are miles beyond what it offers. (See demoscene.) PICO-8 is on par with the old Tiger Electronics game.com "console" or even a bit worse, quite a lot inferior to NES. Even then, with cleverness you can do a lot with it. Including proper raycasting. Picostein 3D. :) Or rather POOM. Even with their quirky hardware choices and slow CPUs. The style was mostly due to speed wotg which the games were cranked out, plus lack of knowledge and skill of particular authors. Pooling knowledge leads to some amazing results.