However, TIC-80 only exists because PICO-8 does, and without money, presumably PICO-8 couldn't've been made, the dude would have had to be doing other work to live.
Previously this guy made Voxatron, which I imagine paid for PICO-8, and that presumably paid for Picotron, so if I don't buy Picotron, then perhaps I'll prevent his next work of art from coming to fruition?
Yes it bothers me a little bit that PICO-8 itself isn't open source, but I can't see the alternative, otherwise how can the dev afford to be spending time thinking about and working on these new things?
It's not as though this is a huge company, or that there are alternative means of generating income from it (no Enterprise wants PICO-8 support, for example).
I don't see an alternative to giving the dev a few bucks to keep making art projects that I love.
The pico-8 is very reasonably priced and for a few extra bucks you get Voxatron. I'm a huge advocate of open source but the pico-8 is just so lovely, and the community so creative and accommodating, that I didn't mind contributing. I have yet to check out the TIC-80 but I plan to after getting a little more fluent on the pico.
But TIC-80 just is so much better than PICO-8. Not just the resolutions (which people can argue are an aesthetic choice for PICO-8) but the fact that you aren't limited to lua but have a variety of languages (some Lisp inspired) in TIC-80.
Having such specific limits is exactly the point of PICO-8 though. If I wanted a variety of options, I’d be using a more traditional engine or library.
There are plenty of alternatives you could find on [1] in the context of fantasy console, almost all of them, oss or proprietary, active or dormant. And honestly many of them were inspired by PICO-8.
Disclaimer: I'm one of the contributors of the list of [2].
