Guides
PICO-8 vs TIC-80: which fantasy console should a beginner start with?
One of these is open source and free. The other is closed source and costs $14.99. Both are excellent, and the right pick depends on whether you want to publish or to own your toolchain.
- Topic
- Open source
- Difficulty
- beginner
- Spoilers
- None
The two fantasy consoles get compared constantly, and the comparison is usually framed as “PICO-8 is the polished one, TIC-80 is the open-source one”. That is accurate, but it buries the part that actually decides it for a beginner: PICO-8 is not open source. It is a commercial product that costs $14.99, and no amount of community goodwill changes that.
So the honest question is not which is better. It is whether you want a polished closed tool or a rough open one.
The specifications, side by side
| PICO-8 | TIC-80 | |
|---|---|---|
| Display | 128×128, 16 colours | 240×136, 16 colours |
| Cart size | 32k | Standalone cartridge file |
| Sound | 4-channel chip blerps | 4 channels |
| Sprites | 256 × 8×8 | 256 × 8×8 |
| Map | 128×32 tiles | — |
| Language | P8 Lua (8192 token limit) | 9 languages |
| Licence | Proprietary, $14.99 | MIT, free |
| Memory banks | 1 | 1 (PRO: 8) |
Both are deliberately constrained, and both constraints are the point. The 8192-token limit on PICO-8 code is what forces small, finished games instead of abandoned ambitious ones.
Where PICO-8 wins
The tools are built in and they are good. Code, sprite, map, music and sound editors all live inside the console. You never leave the environment, which is a real advantage when you are learning — no build step, no IDE, no config file.
SPLORE. PICO-8 ships a cartridge browser that connects to the online collection. You can play other people’s games without leaving the console, and read their source.
Cartridges are PNG files. A PICO-8 cart saves as a .p8.png — a valid image with the game embedded. You can post one in a chat and anyone can open it, with or without owning PICO-8. The author can open it again and read the code, graphics and sound. For teaching, this is close to ideal.
It runs on almost nothing. Lexaloffle’s own guidance is a Raspberry Pi with roughly a 700MHz CPU, which is why PICO-8 shows up in handheld custom firmware — and why we wrote a separate guide on the Pico-8 settings that actually matter on a Miyoo Mini Plus or RG35XX.
Exports. A cart can be exported to standalone HTML5, Windows, macOS and Linux builds.
Where TIC-80 wins
It is MIT licensed. You can read it, fork it, build it, ship it. For anyone who cares about owning their toolchain, this is not a minor point.
Nine languages. Lua, Moonscript, JavaScript, Ruby, Wren, Fennel, Squirrel, Janet and Python. PICO-8 gives you one dialect of Lua. If you already write JavaScript or Python, TIC-80 lets you use it.
It runs everywhere, including Android. Official builds for Windows, Linux, macOS and FreeBSD, plus an Android package on F-Droid and community iOS builds. The same cartridge runs on all of them.
PRO adds version control. The paid PRO build can save carts in a text format, which means you can put a TIC-80 game in git and read the diff. It also raises memory banks from 1 to 8 and lets you export without the editor. You can also build PRO yourself from source with a CMake flag, which is a very TIC-80 answer to the question of paying for it.
More screen. 240×136 against 128×128 is a meaningfully larger canvas, closer to a Game Boy Advance than a Game Boy.
The actual decision
Choose PICO-8 if you want to finish something and share it. The ecosystem is larger, the tools are better, the carts are portable to people who do not own the software, and the 8192-token limit will make you a better designer. Paying $14.99 once, with all future updates included, is not the obstacle it sounds like.
Choose TIC-80 if the licence matters to you, you want to use a language you already know, or you want your game in version control as text. Accept that the tooling is rougher and the community is smaller.
Choose neither if you want to make something large. Both consoles will stop you, on purpose. That is the design, not a bug, and if it frustrates you then what you want is a general-purpose engine — we compared five small open-source engines you can learn in a weekend elsewhere.
A note on open-source PICO-8 players
One genuinely useful consequence of PICO-8’s cartridge format being a PNG: people have written independent open-source players that run .p8.png carts, which is how handheld firmware runs PICO-8 games without a PICO-8 licence. That is a licensing grey area, not a legal loophole — the carts are the authors’ work, and the format being readable does not make the software open source.
Worth knowing so you understand what your handheld is doing. Not worth building a business on.