You and me both. There is already a lot out there similar running linux. Odroid go and other things running open dingux. Pico-8 as it stands needs a lot of horsepower as it's all lua scripts. I've talked to Lex about making a dedicated pico-8 console he says it would be tough, you basically need fully PC hardware to be faithful to what the virtual console should be able to do. I'm certain a lot of carts could be cross compiled into binaries and run just fine though he wasn't excited about that approach.

There's a couple of pico-8 emulators that run on Dingux, the problems they have seem mostly due to incompatibilities rather than computing power

https://github.com/Jakz/retro8

https://0xcafed00d.itch.io/tac08-rg350

I was wondering if Nim could be a good tool here by compiling to C, here is a PICO-8 inspired lib written in it:

https://github.com/ftsf/nico

Sounds like the Gamebuino.

https://gamebuino.com/

Yep this is pretty close!

thanks, looks good

If you're up for some hacking and soldering iron use, the Nintendo game and watch systems can be modded pretty easily to load more games, or homebrew code of your own creation. I don't think there's a pico-8 port yet, but it is a tiny little ARM Cortex-M4 board with a nice color screen, dpad, and buttons that you can load any bare metal code and go wild. There's a lot of good info here: https://www.reddit.com/r/GameAndWatchMods/

Cortex-M7, actually! The STM32H7B0 is a surprisingly capable processor.

The main limitation of the Game and Watch platform is the lack of any standard external interface -- while the system has a USB port, it's only used for charging. I've seen a couple of creative solutions to the problem, but they all require some pretty significant soldering skills.

Same, but tic-80 instead. :)

An ESP32 version anyone? :)

This is what the Odroid Go was, but it's been discontinued. There's an Arduboy firmware for it. I think there are still some other slightly less polished ESP32 handhelds around, but the Odroid Go was a great (and cheap) little thing.

https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-go/

https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?t=42463

> This is what the Odroid Go was

I have one and it's a really nice piece of hardware that runs lots of games at native speed. Thanks to being an open platform, I'll probably turn it into some sort of WiFi terminal or else. For sure it won't collect dust in a drawer like many closed devices do when they become old. The Arduboy seems a nice little device, however at that price it is less appealing than say the Odroid Go Advance which has much powerful hardware but costs only $5 more. I wonder if they could axe the costs even further by not making the entire device but only a board with buttons, display and battery charging circuitry, which could host one of those cheap ATmega32u4 boards.

I mean, there's still the Odroid Go Advance and the Odroid Go Super:

https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-go-advance-black-edit...

https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-go-super-clear-white/

... which are Linux(?) handhelds with Ghz+ multicore ARM chips. Quite different.