Those don't have GPIO pins, the Odroid Go does. There's something inherently charming about being able to run emulated games on a microcontroller. Also, because it's an ESP32, it supports Arduino so playing around with programming it is fairly straightforward.

The Go has good battery life, instant-on, and has a certain DIY spirit. I don't know if it's possible to run MakeCode programs directly on the Odroid Go but it would probably be doable for someone with more knowledge of these things.

You're speaking my language. This is a shameless self plug but we - that is Pimoroni - are working on 32blit which is an STM32F750-based microcontroller games console that should be up for general sale soooon - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pimoroni/32blit-retro-i...

Our beta backer tier have been godlike in their ability to make the STM32 do things I'd never thought we'd see... much less see before it's even launched. I mean it already has a Doom port.

I think, compared to the off-the-shelf Emu handhelds on which I cut my teeth (as far back as GP2X and Dingoo A320 days) it's underpowered and overpriced but you're dead on the money that they have a different charm and set of challenges.

MakeCode compiles down to native instructions, IIRC, so it should run on pretty much anything capable of running a screen that meets their - relatively forgiving - specs - https://arcade.makecode.com/hardware/adding

Edit: GP2X not GP32X!

Yes, MakeCode compiles (in the web browser) to ARM machine code. The MakeCode team is very interested in new handhelds. Any handheld that can run MakeCode Arcade games will also be able to run TileCode, which is built using MakeCode Arcade.

I've been keeping an eye on the 32blit, glad to hear there will be a general release! I ported my game framework to the Cortex-M0+ Gamebuino earlier, and Cortex-M7 with FPU and 1MB RAM are next level in comparison, sounds more capable for computation than the GP2X too.