The difficulty in making retro style (programming) hardware is that any technique you use to use to make it nowadays could be trivially be boosted to be much more powerful, sufficiently powerful in fact you could probably just run a software emulator for the thing.

I'm going the route of others with making a fantasy console, and will be content to run it on mobile platforms in an emulator, which is what happens with the pico8.

That said, I do have a half baked idea in my head to make something from a AtMega and an ESP32. If the higher clockspeed of the esp32 is enough to make it pretend to be a valid xram interface for the AtMega. Then output s-video out the DACs.

Honestly, I can't recommend the GBASP enough. It's small, it has a lot of power for a handheld of that era (enough to pull off texture-mapped polygonal graphics at an acceptable frame rate) and the addressable ROM size is practically limitless, going all the way to 64 MB.

I guess I should add another requirement to my wish list: a modern app store so indie devs can sell their games :)

I am considering teaching a university course where the students implement a NES or GB emulator though. Should be a blast!

> I am considering teaching a university course where the students implement a NES or GB emulator though. Should be a blast!

I was considering doing the same for my Machine Language class, but it seems that many games rely on the precise timing of the emulation to work. And, because the output was an anolog TV, there are a lot of tricks that need to be figured out. I thought that was a no-go for a course.

yea, I posted with another suggestion on this thread, but the GBA itself is just such a dream machine. It's the sweet spot for retro programming in my mind. All the cool console features, streamlined hardware, simple interface. So good.

not popular I guess; it's not even out yet, but the Pimoroni people are doing a GBA-like handheld kickstarter geared towards developing, called 32blit. Doesn't have all the cool bitmap, sprite, etc hardware I'm sure, but they try and give a pretty integrated environment. Also maybe geared a bit more towards beginners, but I really like the idea. And because it's modern hardware, you can just use all your standard tools. It's also got hardware debugging, looks like.

I actually just saw this a few minutes ago (Jeff Atwood retweeted it). It looks very nice! I only hope it gains traction.