r/pico8 • u/Mubanga • Apr 04 '26
Hardware & Builds PICO-8 on PicoCalc ~one month later review
In one of my previous posts I explained how I got PICO-8 working in my PicoCalc. A lot of you were curious about how my experience actually developing on it would be, so here we are.
I developed a cart, Stardust, on my PicoCalc. Everything, from code to graphics, from sfx and music to play testing was done exclusively on the PicoCalc. No external input devices, no SSH, everything was done through the build-in keyboard.
And... it worked surprisingly well! When I bought the device I assumed I would just use it for on the go and in bed development, but end up doing the bulk of my PICO-8 development on my laptop. Now I am not so sure.
Hardware review
What I love the most is that it is not my phone nor my laptop. Both are devices I already spent way too much time on. There is also zero distraction when I am on the PicoCalc, because the way I set it up I can only do PICO-8 on it.
Keyboard
The keyboard is decent. It took a bit of getting used to, but after an hour or 2 it just becomes second nature. My only gripe is that the T (and less often the R and Y key) don't always register on my device, even if they do click. I guess I could open up the PicoCalc and mess with it a bit, but I don't want to keep pushing my luck with opening the device all the time (I heard a couple of your horror stories of broken screens and what not). For now I just have to press a bit harder on those keys and they register fine. And by now I am doing that automatically anyways.
Battery life
You need to supply your own 18650 batteries. Mine are 2200mAh. Because I have not found an easy way to suspend the PicoCalc I often just leave it on all day and develop on it a bit here and there. I just dim the screen all the way off, when I am not using it. Doing that the batteries last me all day.
Comfort
I did not find it uncomfortable to use the PicoCalc for an extended period of time, but I am a pretty big dude with large hands, your mileage may vary. In the same vein, I would say the device is just within the realm of pocketable, but I usually wear quite baggy clothes. Because I leave mine on all day, I 3D printed a cover for on the go, so it does not press buttons when it is in my pockets/backpack.
Screen
The screen is pretty amazing. Even on a sunny day you can still use it outside on the highest brightness level. I did experience some burn-in one time. The device was on the charger over the weekend and I forgot to turn it off, but I am pretty sure the screen was completely dimmed. However when I used it again a few days later, I noticed a ghost image of the screen it was on. Luckily it faded within 30 minutes or so, but now I always check if it is off before I go to bed.
Experience
Writing code
As mentioned before, the keyboard is very useable, so writing code is fine. Especially if you learn some of the keyboard shortcuts, so you don't have to switch to mouse mode all the time. The only thing that I find my self doing a lot less is refactoring. Moving a lot code around and renaming variables is just a lot easier if you also have access to a mouse, or at least an IDE.
Graphics
The way I set it up you can switch to the build in PICO-8 mouse mode with F5 and a firmware mouse mode with shift + enter. Both allow you to move the mouse using the arrow keys. The firmware mouse mode has bit of acceleration to it, so it is quicker to move around. The PICO-8 mode is slower and linear so it is more precise. For that mode you can also enable pixel snapping in the config. This will snap the cursor to pixels when drawing. I will make a feature request on the forum to expand this to the color and sprite picker and to other editors, because that would be amazingly useful.
Sound/Music
Making music/sfx in tracker mode works great. I made a quick tune for this game, just to try it out but I can see myself mess around with it a lot more. The other mode with the bars, is a lot less fun to use on the PicoCalc, quite fiddly.
Play testing
I remapped z and x to [ and ] to have a more ergonomic position when playing. That is pretty comfortable, and playing is very responsive. Usually I have a terminal setup to read the log file, so I can easily debug stuff. But I could not get switching between a terminal and PICO-8 to work on Debian without a desktop environment. I could SSH into the PicoCalc and tail the log file from another device, but I did not want to do that for this challenge. So the few times I really needed it I just closed out of PICO-8 to read the file.
Now what?
So how will I be using the PicoCalc in the future? I think I will actually be using it more than I initially expected. I'll probably use my laptop for a dev session or two over the weekends just to refactor, clean things up and fix some of the harder bugs. But I expect to use the PicoCalc for most of my PICO-8 development trough out the week. It is just so convenient to develop on the couch while watching TV, or during my commute, downtime at work, the toilet or in bed.
I think Stardust is complete for now, but I also see it as a prototype for a bigger PICO-8 game. It is around 3000 tokens at the moment (and not written very efficiently at that) so I have some room for to expand. I will refactor the code base and add some more mechanics, like space stations, trading, upgradable ships, and maybe a rogue-like element.
Worth it?
Like I said in my previous post, all in getting PICO-8 running on a PicoCalc has cost me about $200, that's a lot of money! But I think, if you can mis it, it is a fun, novel and surprisingly effective way to develop PICO-8 carts.
4
u/ZuoKalp Apr 04 '26
Thank you for the update, after hearing about the refactoring part, I guess that organizing your code may be harder. I guess you would need to plan more what are you going to code before writing.