The cover image is the image that will be displayed in the official website or in the surf menu.

It is necessary for your cart to have a cover image before being uploaded to the TIC-80 website, as well as title and author tags in the metadata.

Add a cover image

From the game

Run the game, press F7 to take a screenshot which will be your cover image, and then save.
On mobile you might need to change the input tag to display the keyboard.

You can also do it programmatically using sync(128,0,true) in your code.

From an external image

Use import command to import an image you want to use as cover image. To use file.png as cover, in the console use import screen file.png command. The image should be in PNG format and 240×136 pixels size.
Note that you can use external tools to convert a high resolution image to TIC-80 format.

From another cart

Open your cart in TIC-80 and then load the cover of another cart with load other_cart.tic screen.

About import/load

While importing images or loading from another cart, colors are merged to the closest color of the palette.
For example, with default palette, this image:

becomes:

Show Cover Image

There is two ways to check the cover image of a cartridge before uploading to the website.

Display Cover Image

Running a cart with an empty TIC() function will display the cover image if there is one.

function TIC()
end

Export Cover Image

To export the cover image, load the cartridge and do export screen my_cover.