TIC-80 1.2.0 is out

TIC-80 1.2.0 is out, and it is the biggest one in years: almost three years after 1.1.2837, with a new scripting language, a new console port, a PCM sound channel and a long list of editor and platform fixes.

If you are new here: TIC-80 is a tiny fantasy computer for making, playing and sharing small games. One 240x136 screen, one 64KB cartridge, and a handful of built-in tools: code, sprite, map, music and sound editors, with more than a dozen scripting languages to write your game in. Games are made in the browser, in the desktop app, or exported to a standalone build for Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, the web, and now the Switch.

What’s new in 1.2.0

• YueScript joins the language list. Lua (now 5.4), Python (pocketpy 2.0.4), Fennel, Janet, Squirrel and QuickJS all got updates too.
• PCM sound channel: write samples straight from your code, 128 per frame at 7680 Hz, from any language, with no new API to learn. FFT support arrived with it, so spectrum effects are a few lines away.
• A Nintendo Switch port, a rebuilt 3DS port, and a pile of Android, Linux, macOS, libretro and baremetal Raspberry Pi fixes.
• Touch controls for the HTML export, so a game exported for the web is playable on a phone.
• Music editor: a wider note range, a DAW-like keyboard layout for entering notes, preview routed to the channel you are editing, and hex input with Caps Lock.
• Code editor: remap() for palette swaps, flood-fill painting, autosave and resume reload in Surf, JSON options, an rm alias for del, and a long list of scroll, selection and undo fixes.
• The pause menu follows where the run came from now. In a player’s run ESC always opens it (a game can still add its own items), while a run started from the studio steps back to the editor. The old devmode metatag is gone.

Thanks

This release carries well over two hundred pull requests from more than sixty contributors, many of them first-timers. Every one of them is credited by name in the full changelog.

Get it

• Download the desktop builds right here on this page, or push a cartridge over to a friend’s machine.
• Play in the browser, read the docs and write a game at tic80.com. The web player runs 1.2.0 now.
• The complete list of changes, with every pull request and author, is in the release notes on GitHub.

Happy making.