Thanks!
For vanilla PICO-8, my last hope is to use PicoMap to reduce token/character count as explained in the last devlog. I’ll post a major update devlog if I manage to do this.
For Batocera, I have yet to upgrade the project to the more recent PICO-8 versions for 64-bit support (I assume it’s the reason for incompatibility according to https://forum.batocera.org/blog/6891-pico-8-official-becomes-64-bit), in fact code should be completely compatible, but patching a new version of PICO-8 is what takes time… and with PicoMap, I may not need patching anymore (or just the first patch to unlock token count, which is trivial compared to fast reloading patch, required by my custom multi-tilemap system), so it may not be worth the effort and I prefer waiting for PicoMap integration before upgrading PICO-8 once more.