Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Meg-4, the Open Source PICO-8 alternative
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:…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Meg-4, the Open Source PICO-8 alternative launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1
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 · its alternatives →
- 2
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 · its alternatives →
- 3
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 · its alternatives →
- 4
- 5JS
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 · its alternatives →
- 6
Fix microtypography hiccups in multiple languages.
2020 · marketplace.visualstudio.com · its alternatives →
- 7
Contribute to mohshomis/modo development by creating an account on GitHub.
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 8
- 9
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 · its alternatives →
- 10
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 · its alternatives →
- 11
Make 8-Bit Art!▲107An in-browser canvas tool for making retro art.
2014 · make8bitart.com · its alternatives →
- 12
TL;DR: private, in-browser converter that turns pretty much any image file format into standard JPEGs. Everything runs locally. No uploads. This started as a five-minute job and forty hours later... I wanted to convert a HEIC without uploading it anywhere, so I wrestled Emscripten/WebAssembly to run Google's Jpegli inside a Web Worker. Now there's a small UI and it handles a bunch of formats. Just about the only thing it can't decode is JXL - but there's still some JPEG XL magic in there: XYB perceptual color quantization is enabled by default via Jpegli. The upside of all this…
2025 · onlyjpg.com · its alternatives →
- 13
An open source Hardware Secure Module in your hands. Keep your private and secret keys safe with Pico HSM.
2024 · picokeys.com · its alternatives →
- 14
Faster utf8.Valid using multi-byte processing without SIMD. - sugawarayuuta/charcoal
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15
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 · its alternatives →
- 16TH
Hi again HN. The short version: a retro style computer simulator, focused on low-level coding. You could sort of think of it as pico8's low-level stuff (peek/poke, memory access, vram, etc) turned up 1000%. For example, it gives you a Lua API for encoding assembly to memory and then running it, and you can access the same memory space from Lua as from Assembly. It uses your native assembly btw, it's not a custom assembly language, it's real 64-bit windows assembly. It also comes with LPeg built in, so that you can experiment with generating either Lua bytecode or native assembly, making…
2025 · hram.dev · its alternatives →
- 17
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 · its alternatives →
- 18
$15 open-source macropad with offline HTML config
Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19UB
Hi. I've been using the US-intl keyboard layout for a while, as ABTN2 (the standard Brazilian Portuguese) layout treats ' and " as dead keys, which makes programming incredibly annoying for me. However, US-intl makes accented letters like ã, à and â annoying to type, requiring holding Alt as you press the respective keys. As a solution, I decided to make a small fork of US-intl that changes ~, ` and ^ to dead keys, while leaving ' and " as non-dead keys (as you can easily type á with Alt+a). It's nothing major or substantial, but I thought I'd share it in case some other brazilian /…
2021 · its alternatives →
- 20
- 21
Pollly: Free YAML editor made for everyone. 100% Free and online. Start to translate your app or site now!
2017 · pollly.orson.io · its alternatives →
- 22
pompelmi▲10Hi HN — I’m the author of pompelmi, an open-source, in-process scanner for untrusted file uploads in Node.js. Motivation: I wanted a practical “upload guard” that reduces common upload risks (ZIP bombs, traversal in archives, MIME spoofing, polyglots/macro hints) without sending files to a cloud AV service (privacy + latency + GDPR concerns). Key points: - Runs in-process (no cloud calls); files never leave your infrastructure - Deep ZIP inspection with configurable limits (depth/entries/ratio) + nested archive scanning - Composable scanners (heuristics + optional signature…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23
Open-Source, GitHub Copilot Alternative for VS Code
2024 · flexpilot.ai · its alternatives →
- 24
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 · its alternatives →
Also compare
- Interactive pinout for the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 alternatives
- Pico: An open-source Ngrok alternative built for production traffic alternatives
- Driftmania – an open source PICO-8 racing game alternatives
- Pico alternatives
- Joyride: script VSCode like Emacs but using Clojure alternatives
- Typopo for VS Code alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →