PICO-Book: "The Black Cat" by Edgar Allan Poe

Published 2023-06-12


Introducing the first ever fully-featured e-book reader for the PICO-8!

I decided to include Poe's "The Black Cat" as an example story, mostly because it almost perfectly fits within the length requirements of this e-book engine (this story happens to be 21747 characters long uncompressed).

The text of the story is not stored as strings within the program, but it is encoded with Huffman coding in the bytes of the spritesheet and map. This is a more complete version of this project, so look at the details of that to learn more.

One thing I added here is the ability to save your progress through resets, and also add one bookmark that you can set and jump to anytime, with the X and O buttons respectively.

Let me know what you think!