controls

btn = "button"

btn( index, [player] )

If you hold the button down, this will act like it is rapidly pressed.

For multiplayer games, you will need to include player numbers (0-7).

These are the button indexes you can use:

Button Glyphs

These are the glyphs or symbols that are used inside of the PICO-8 code editor. These button glyphs can actually replace the button numbers when using the btn() function.

This is what that code will look like inside of PICO-8, with the buttons appearing as glyphs:

Here is what the glyphs look like oustide of PICO-8:

function _update()

	if btn(⬅️) then x-=1 end --left
	if btn(➡️) then x+=1 end --right
	if btn(⬆️) then y-=1 end --up
	if btn(⬇️) then y+=1 end --down
	if btn(🅾) then a=true end--o
	if btn(❎) then b=true end--x

end

btnp = "button pressed"

btnp( index, [player] )

If you hold the button down, this will only return true once because it also checks if on the last frame the button was not pressed. However, if you hold the button down for longer than 15 frames, then this resets and does return true. It will then continue to return true every 4 frames after that.

For multiplayer games, you will need to include player numbers (0-7).

These are the button indexes you can use:

Custom Delay Length

You can set your own button delay by poking memory 0X5F5C like this:

POKE(0X5F5C, DELAY) 

You can set it to 255 to stop the btnp from resetting automatically at all, so that the player must release the button and press again for it to trigger again.

You can set your own repeating delay by poking memory 0X5F5D ike this:

POKE(0X5F5D, DELAY) 

By default, PICO-8 does not track mouse inputs. In order to access the mouse and full keyboard inputs, you first need to enable devkit input mode with this poke:

POKE( 0x5F2D, flags )

There are 3 flags that you can send with this memory poke:

Warning from the Manual: "Note that not every PICO-8 will have a keyboard or mouse attached to it, so when posting carts to the Lexaloffle BBS, it is encouraged to make keyboard and/or mouse control optional and off by default, if possible. When devkit input mode is enabled, a message is displayed to BBS users warning them that the program may be expecting input beyond the standard 6-button controllers."

After enabling the devkit mode and the mouse inputs, you will need to use stat to get the mouse data for your game.

The state of the mouse and keyboard can be found in stat(x):