USB interface ideas

[asumagic]

Ideally when these ideas mature out a little this issue could be split up into several with a "USB support" tag.

USB mass storage

This would allow for copying games to the flash and to update the firmware. This should preferably allow to reserve some amount of storage for the firmware, should be bricking-resilient to an extent, and not wipe out games and config on flashing.
Maybe this could both take .p8 and .p8.png but perform some sort of preprocessing and compression on the fly which would allow storing probably more than twice as many cartridges.
Also maybe something that would make loading cartridges from BBS easier?

Usage as a desktop PICO-8 monitor/gamepad?

It would be really nice if you could just plug in yocto-8 hardware, open up PICO-8 and have seamless integration: the PICO-8 display would be mirrored on the device and you could use it as a gamepad as well.
This may be a bit complicated to implement, and how would one even do that on Windows without a custom driver?
We don't really want to use an existing display interface since a pico-8 framebuffer is paletted and would be much lighter to send over without compression.

Pluggable mouse and keyboard

This would really be an extra, but if it's possible without too much development workload, why not? AFAIK tinyUSB should have plenty of examples for something like that, and it seems like that in the next minor pico SDK support for this should be better.

External USB storage

I don't think this would be very useful since a few MB of Flash should already hold plenty of cartridges, and this would require at least having a FAT32 driver.