Alternatives
Products that do what Meg-4, the Open Source PICO-8 alternative does
Hi fellow hackers, I've created a GPL licensed alternative to the proprietary PICO-8. It also addresses most of its shortcomings: - multilanguage support - uses UTF-8 encoding (BMP only) - sophisticated user input methods (direct codepoint, composition, Hiragana and Katakana etc.) - provides a large and efficient API library for your scripts - supports C, BASIC, Assembly and Lua scripts (more to come) - supports wide variety of file formats (Amiga MOD, MIDI, Tiled TMX, PNG, etc.) - capable of importing PICO-8 and TIC-80 cartridges - runs in your browser:…
- 1IP
I've been trying to make accessible and beautiful GPIO pinouts since I started one for the Raspberry Pi in 2013 [1]. I've since given the Raspberry Pi Pico [2] and Pico 2 [3] microcontrollers the same treatment when they launched. Recently I've updated these with a new "Upside-down" view to complement the rear view, giving a pinout in the right orientation to match your project. The Pico sites are all hand-coded single HTML pages with supporting CSS and minimal JS. They are set up to optionally install as a "Desktop" web app. They also degrade into a somewhat usable table in lieu of CSS and…
2025 · pico2.pinout.xyz
- 2PA
Pico is an open-source alternative to Ngrok. Unlike most other open-source tunnelling solutions, Pico is designed to serve production traffic and be simple to host (particularly on Kubernetes). Upstream services connect to Pico and register endpoints. Pico will then route requests for an endpoint to a registered upstream service via its outbound-only connection. This means you can expose your services without opening a public port. Pico runs as a cluster of nodes in order to be fault tolerant, scale horizontally and support zero downtime deployments. It is also easy to host, such as a…
2024 · github.com
- 3DA
I've been spending a lot of my spare time over the last year creating this little racing game. It's built in PICO-8, which is a really fun “fantasy retro console” that's been mentioned on HN several times. The console has strict limits and I wanted to see how far I could push them The source code for the game is over here: https://github.com/maxbize/PICO-8/tree/master/Driftmania. It's a bit of a mess, but I'm happy to answer any questions on it or development of the game. Cheers! EDIT: For those not familiar with PICO-8, there's only a few inputs: arrow…
2024 · frenchie14.itch.io
- 4BW
2018 · bitmidi.com
- 5
- 6MI
Apr 2026 · github.com
- 7JS
Together with PEZ (Peter Strömberg) I made a VSCode extension that allows you to script VSCode using Clojure (interpreted CLJS). The repo: https://github.com/BetterThanTomorrow/joyride Introductory video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1oTf-1EchU See examples directory: https://github.com/BetterThanTomorrow/joyride/tree/master/ex... See animated gifs and news on Twitter: https://twitter.com/hashtag/vsjoyride?src=hashtag_click&f=li...
2022
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- 10PA
10 years ago I began working on Muki, a web-based MIDI and chiptune player which I eventually announced here on HN[0]. It was a fun weekend project. Over the years I received numerous requests from people that wanted more: more music, more features, more playable formats, you name it. Eventually I began working on a complete rewrite of the app (this time for real), and, realizing that each year another chiptune or MIDI website went offline, I decided to start archiving them for preservation. Today, 10 years after the first release, I think it's finally time for the new, nicer version to hit…
2024 · pixeltune.org
- 11XA
Hello HN, While there are some projects that implement partial versions of Xlib APIs on non-X11 platforms for compatibility (most notably, Tk), I don't know of any others sophisticated enough to run Cairo and GTK applications (albeit with a few hacks). So I figured this might be technically interesting. As of now it just implements the base Xlib APIs, it doesn't implement XRender, GLX, XInput2, etc. (though it's more than possible, I just didn't see a need yet.) Cross-program interaction is also very limited, and there are plenty of X11 features that likely can't be implemented; but this…
2022 · github.com
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- 13MV
Hi HN! We're excited to release our VS Code/Cursor extension for marimo [1], an open-source, reactive Python notebook. This extension provides a native experience for working with marimo notebooks, a long-requested feature that we’ve worked hard to get right. An LSP-first architecture The core of our extension is a marimo notebook language server (marimo-lsp [2]). As far as we know, it’s the first notebook runtime to take this approach. The Language Server Protocol (LSP) [3] offers a small but important set of notebook-related capabilities that we use for document and kernel syncing;…
Nov 2025 · github.com
- 14PL
2023 · github.com
- 15PA
I was experimenting with ways to store pinout data to generate the Pico pinout website [1] rather than hand-editing HTML- and got carried away. Pretty much all the heavy lifting is done by the Python library "rich" [2], which makes colourised/structured output on the command-line dangerously easy. * [1] - https://pico.pinout.xyz * [2] - https://github.com/Textualize/rich
2023 · github.com
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- 18RG
Hi there, Zero Stars here. I recently published some new work to Hokusai Pocket, which is a cross-platform binary made on top of raylib and MRuby that runs GUIs from ruby scripts. License? MIT! How does it work? The binary is available on the GitHub releases page: https://github.com/skinnyjames/hokusai-pocket/releases/tag/0... You can download the binary on x86 Windows, OSX, or Linux, and run your GUI application with hokusai-pocket run:target="" For a little bit of a hello world, I started a photoshop clone…
Apr 2026 · github.com
- 19CN
2020 · conducto.com
- 20PU
After seeing a cool demo of a hack on Twitter, I built a cross platform version of it that works well and uses streaming. From anywhere on Mac and Linux, trigger Ollama and optionally feed it your clipboard. I built it yesterday and it's already very useful to me. I'm pretty excited about it and wanted to share!
2024 · github.com
- 21WR
I've been working on a C-based open source sound engine as part of a book project and wanted an approachable way for people to try it out without having to build anything. Through the magic of emscripten (which I'm totally amazed by) and miniaudio (which has given me new life late in my development career), and a smidge of vibe-coded HTML/JS (web-dev is not my jam), this page will let you try out the tooling. I gave a lightning talk on the ASCII notation at ElixirConf EU last month here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnJ0osgiqWM There's a work-in-progress tutorial for…
May 2026 · octetta.github.io
- 22OS
Hey Hackers, Webstudio is an Open Source alternative to Webflow, and we just launched Webstudio CMS! We took an unusual approach to CMS because we wanted to prioritize maximum scalability, performance, and flexibility. So technically there is no CMS, but instead you can integrate with any headless CMS and its live! Go try it out! Here is a deep-dive using it with Hygraph https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QC6Y7BHduLw To celebrate the launch we are giving away 3 Month of Pro account for free (expires in 24h): HACKERNEWS
2024 · github.com
- 23IM
So I'm a junior Go dev and I made a small site that allows me to share images with someone privately and securely, and give me control over how many times the private link can be shared and how long the image will be accessible for. There are similar services to this one, but they are either convoluted with ads, or require sign-up, or expect you to fill out a survey or something. picburn is small, safe, and has no interest (nor the code or the server space) for storing your uploads. give it a try if it fits your usecase and let me know what you think. Note: there was a typo in the url
Aug 2026 · picburn.xyz
- 24CA
Made this during COVID. I was into PICO-8 at the time and saw someone ported DOOM to it. I'm more of a text adventure guy, so I decided to port ADVENT. Basically I wrote a FORTRAN-to-Lua transpiler. The hardest part was figuring out what version of FORTRAN the source code was written in, finding a manual, cramming it into the limited cartridge space, but most of all, wrapping my mind around the data file format. Always admired Will Crowther for making this. Very fun project. I recorded myself during the whole process but I never posted a video. Future work maybe.
2024 · lexaloffle.com
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