PICOSYNC - Dev Tool for PICO-8

PICOSYNC acts as a bridge between your favorite coding/pixel art software and PICO-8. Changes to external files are merged into PICO-8 cart files automatically as you work.

How it works

PICOSYNC monitors Lua files and a sprites.png file in a folder containing a PICO-8 cart file (.p8). When a monitored file changes, the Lua code and sprite data are merged into the cart file which can then be reloaded in PICO-8 by pressing ctrl+r as usual.

• Edit Lua source code in your favorite code editor in separate files.
• Edit sprite data in your favorite image editor.
• Automatically merge changes into PICO-8 cart files while preserving Map, Sound, and Music data. PICOSYNC will also create a backup before each merge.
• Custom palette remapping allows mixing PICO-8 standard colors with colors from the secret palette.

What is a project?

A project is a folder that contains a .p8 file, a sprites.png file, zero or more Lua source files, and a picosync.json config file. The sprites.png and picosync.json files are created automatically when a project is loaded if they don't already exist.

How to load a project?

Drag a project folder onto the PICOSYNC window. By default the PICO-8 file that data will be merged into is <foldername>.p8 but this can be overwritten in the picosync.json config file (see below).

The picosync.json file

{
    //override the file name of the PICO-8 cart to merge into
    "picoFile":"",
    
    //use a custom palette to remap colors. useful for accessing secret palette
    "customPaletteFile":"palette.png",
    
    //a list of source files to merge sequentially
    "sources":[
        "main.lua",
        "render.lua"
    ]
}

You must add any new Lua source files that you create to the sources list in order for them to be monitored for changes and merged into the PICO-8 cart.

If no source files are listed, PICOSYNC will leave the Lua section of the cart unchanged. This is useful if you only want to only merge sprite data while coding in PICO-8. Likewise, transparent pixels in sprites.png will leave the corresponding pixel in the cart unchanged.