I have a crappy computer. One of the things that attracted me to fantasy consoles was the assurance that, no matter what game I try, it would perform well on my machine. Also, secondarily, if I end up really making a game, it would run on pretty much anyone's computer. "It even run on your grandma's rig!", like they said in the good old days of Ace of Spades*.
But very soon while trying out TIC-80 games, I came across FPS80. On my computer, it shows a red "sync" all the time. The movements seem alright (compared to a youtube video), but the music is super slow, sound effects are choppy. It seems to be too heavy for my computer. And yes, I was running it directly on my TIC-80, not on the browser.
After that, I made a little research. I'm pretty sure that PICO-8 puts artificial limits to CPU usage, so no one can make a very heavy program without running into that ceiling. And I never had any problem, not even running the seemingly heaviest cartridges. PICO-8 (running in the browser) seems to use at most 60% of my two cores. FPS80 on TIC-80 uses 100% of one core, but seemingly ignores the other.
Now, the questions: Does TIC-80 limit CPU usage? If not, are there plans for it? What would be the minimum requirements, then? Could it be a problem of it not using both cores?
*Funny thing. Ace of Spades (the original game) was made using Voxlap, which inspired Voxatron, which led to PICO-8, which inspired TIC-80.