Importing from PICO-8

Pixel8 shares its palette, waveforms and sprite layout with PICO-8 — a deliberate act of heritage. The practical payoff: a PICO-8 cart’s assets import almost one-to-one.

pixel8 import-pico8 mygame.p8 mygame      # or mygame.p8.png

(or import-pico8 mygame.p8 mygame at the console prompt.) This creates a new project with the cart’s graphics, sprite flags, map, sound effects and music transferred in, plus a stub src/lib.rs to write the game in Rust.

Only the assets come across — the Lua code is ignored. Pixel8 doesn’t run or translate Lua; porting the game logic to Rust is your (fun) job. In practice this is a lovely way to port a game: all the art and sound are instantly in place, so you can concentrate on the code, comparing behavior side by side.

Appending into an existing project

--into merges selected assets into a project you already have, instead of creating a new one:

pixel8 import-pico8 mygame.p8 --into myproject [--sprites R] [--sfx R] [--music R]

with R selecting ranges of slots — cherry-pick a sprite sheet from one cart and sound effects from another.

What maps, and how faithfully

Graphics and maps transfer essentially exactly (same palette, same 8×8 cells, same 128×64 map). Audio maps waveform-for-waveform onto Pixel8’s synth, which is close but not sample-identical to PICO-8’s. The fine print — per-asset mapping tables and known differences — lives in docs/PICO8_IMPORT.md.

One direction only: Pixel8 imports from PICO-8; it doesn’t export to it.