Keith Novak

This post is kind of a brain dump of info I might need to help myself in the future if anything breaks.

I bought PICO-8 finally, figured spending the $20 for thousands of games was well worth it. I had previously used the RETRO-8 emulator built into Retroarch, just for testing out some PICO-8 games. My purchase directly supports the dev who is currently working on a ‘successor’ console.

I also use EmulationStation-DE to play this with a cleaner experience on Linux, however, the Steam controller mapping was not working. So here’s some of what I did to fix it:

1. Download this gamepadtool, which creates an SDL2 mapping you can use. It’s a little too sensitive when used with the Steam controller unfortunately, so make sure you are setting your buttons very carefully.
2. Take the mapping that is created and paste it into a file called sdl_controllers.txt in your Pico-8 folder.
3. EmulationStation-DE will look in the ~/Applications/ folder by default to see if you have any custom emulators; put your entire Pico-8 folder there (*NOT the ROMs, the actual emulator files*)
4. In ES-DE, you should now be able to go into the Options, select “Other Options”, and set the custom emulator for PICO-8 to be the official release.

I hope this helps someone else but it’s mostly for me when I inevitably break something in the future.