After months of hard work, here is the NEW release (1.3) of Irem's R-Type* pico-8 port, featuring the 4 stages in a 32kb cart! (Similar to the PC-Engine port, with 4 in a 256kb hu-card.)
In addition, there are:

30 enemies with most attack patterns and weapon replicated (albeit simplified)
4 HUGE bosses
3 force types with 2 levels of power
60 fps action with arcade-style graphics
Awesome 5 tracks soundtrack by the great @dhostin (YouryKiki) based on Masato Ishizaki's original score, you can listen to the OST on SoundCloud

Hope you enjoy it and please, give me some feedback on performance, especially on lower-end machines.
TheRoboZ
Instructions:
?️ button to shoot, hold to charge the beam
❎ to detachrecall the force sphere. (hold to auto-fire. after a while auto-firing will detach the force so be careful!) The force can be positioned in front and behind, has 3 powers up levels and can be used defensively too, absorbing the small enemy bullets.
(I strongly suggest to play with keyboard or pad as on the phone it might be a bit harder)

Version 1.4

FIXED fsign bug reported on April 11
Token reduction
Optimized sprite rotation
Picodraw cached string to table conversion
Fixed bug in detaching cargo in stage 3
Improved collision bounding boxes in soem cases
Beam draw improvement

Version 1.3

License: None (Free)