Picotron is a Fantasy Workstation for making pixelart games, animations, music, demos and other curiosities. It has a toy operating system designed to be a cosy creative space, but runs on top of Windows, MacOS or Linux. Picotron apps can be made with built-in tools, and shared with other users in a special 256k png cartridge format.
Picotron website
Picotron is very similar to PICO-8, but more powerful and with a few additional features – it’s actually made by the same people as PICO-8. It also contains a small, ‘toy’ operating system to serve as a workspace, everything makes use of Lua, and any applications made with it can be shared using a special 256k PNG cartridge format. It’s currently in alpha, and cost $11.99, and uses the early Minecraft model of a one-time purchase for access to all future updates. The FAQ has tons more information.
It looks incredibly neat. I don’t have much use for it, but I’m interested to see what people with actual skills will make with it.
For those who purchased the humble voxatron debut bundle back in 2011 and used a lexaloffle account to claim the downloads: picotron has been added to that download page ^_^
I just want to add, I bought PICO-8 a while back for $15(?). I hesitated for a while because I was worried it would be a waste of money but… after spending just one weekend making my first game with it, it already felt like I got my money’s worth. It’s SO MUCH FUN.
And FYI for anyone not familiar with the whole PICO-8 ecosystem, the $15 is just for the development studio. Any games that are made for the PICO-8 fantasy console can be distributed and played by anyone for free.