Going further
You’ve built, drawn, beeped and shipped. What’s left is depth, and it lives in two places: the API docs and the repository’s design documents.
API documentation
The SDK’s reference documentation is on docs.rs: docs.rs/pixel8. Everything this book showed — and every alias, error type and edge case it glossed over — is documented there, on the actual functions.
The deeper documents
| document | what’s inside |
|---|---|
| ARCHITECTURE.md | how the console is put together: one framebuffer, one rasterizer, the mode machine |
| ABI.md | the raw wasm import surface between cart and console — for the curious, and for anyone building an alternate SDK |
| LIMITS.md | exact accounting of the 128 K budgets |
| CART_FORMAT.md | how a PNG cartridge is laid out, chunk by chunk |
| WEB_EXPORT.md | how the single-file web player works |
| PICO8_IMPORT.md | the PICO-8 asset mapping, in detail |
| HANDHELD.md | putting the player on retro handhelds |
| TUI.md | the terminal frontend: sixels, input protocols, tuning |
The sandbox, in one paragraph
Since you’ll wonder eventually: carts execute inside wasmi with no WASI, no filesystem, no network and no host memory access. The only imports a cart gets are the small C-like functions of the Pixel8 ABI — draw, input, audio, map, storage, log. Fuel metering turns infinite loops into a friendly error screen. That’s why running a stranger’s cartridge is a safe thing to do, and why carts from today will still run bit-identically wherever the runtime goes next.
Contributing
Pixel8 is free software (GPL-3.0-or-later) and welcomes contributions — bug reports, carts, docs, code. Start with CONTRIBUTING.md. And if you make something with it: the whole point of PNG cartridges is that they’re easy to share. Share them.