#retrogaming

Last time I walked through the basics — the specs, the desktop, a three-line hello world, a dot you can push around with the arrow keys. https://papoo.work/doc/236e7a6b9435d5bd If you went through that and got the dot moving, you cleared the only bar that actually matters on day one: does the thing run. Nobody's proud of a moving dot, though, and nobody's opening the BBS to admire your moving dot either. This is the part after that — the part the first piece skipped on purpose because it was alr

Picotron is Lexaloffle's "fantasy workstation." It comes from Joseph "Zep" White, the same person who made PICO-8, and it carries the same idea into something bigger. Where PICO-8 is one small game console, Picotron is more like a tiny toy computer: it boots into its own little desktop, with windows and built-in tools, and you make games, animations, music, and odd little programs inside it. I find it easiest to describe it like this: PICO-8 hands you a cartridge slot, and Picotron hands you a w

PICO-8 is a fantasy console. That means it's a make-believe game machine that only exists as software — there's no plastic box, no cartridge slot you can touch. You download it, and inside is a little computer with a tiny screen, a handful of colors, and just enough room to make a small game from start to finish. Lexaloffle Games, run by Joseph "Zep" White, put it out in 2015. It didn't invent the idea of a deliberately limited virtual machine, but it's the one that made "fantasy console" a thin

I have a soft spot for TIC-80. It is a free, open-source fantasy computer for making, playing, and sharing tiny games, and it is the one I hand to people who say "I want to make a game but every engine I open makes me feel stupid." TIC-80 does the opposite. You launch it, you get a black screen and a blinking cursor, you type a few lines, and something moves. That first little win is the whole reason fantasy consoles exist. It was made by Vadim Grigoruk (Nesbox) and first released back in 2017.

PixelVision8, often shortened to PV8, is an open-source fantasy console aimed at people who want to learn retro-style game development through a deliberately constrained toolset. What sets it apart is that the machine itself is part of the creative work: instead of starting from a fixed spec, you define the hardware limitations and then build within them. That makes PV8 useful both as a learning environment and as a way to think more carefully about what an 8-bit game machine can be. | Spec | Va

LIKO-12 is an open-source fantasy computer built on the LÖVE framework and written entirely in Lua. It exists as a creative sandbox for making, playing, and sharing small retro-styled games and programs, with a deliberately constrained hardware model and a built-in operating environment called DiskOS. For newcomers, the important point is not that LIKO-12 tries to emulate a real machine, but that it presents a consistent, limited platform for hobby game development — one that is easy to inspect,

BEEP-8 is a fantasy console for making small retro-style games, but it takes a different technical path from most of the field: instead of using a scripting language, it compiles standard C/C++ into real ARM machine code that runs in the browser. It exists for developers who want the discipline of a constrained game machine while still writing code in a familiar systems language. That combination makes it an unusual entry in the fantasy-console space. The limitations are deliberate, and they sha

Microsoft MakeCode Arcade is a free, web-based platform for making retro-style arcade games, with a clear focus on beginners and classroom use. It sits inside Microsoft’s MakeCode ecosystem, which means it is both a teaching environment and an open-source toolchain for building and sharing small games. As a fantasy-console-adjacent system, it matters because it deliberately constrains the playfield, controls, graphics, and sound to something simple enough to learn quickly. Those limits are not a

WASM-4 is a small, open-source fantasy console built around WebAssembly. It exists to let people make compact games under a deliberately tight set of constraints, while keeping one unusual freedom: you can write the cartridge in any language that compiles to WebAssembly, not just a single built-in scripting language. That combination makes it interesting to hobbyist game developers and creative coders who want a minimal target with clear limits. The official site and docs at wasm4.org, plus the

Pyxel is a free, open-source retro game engine for Python. It exists for people who want the constraints and visual language of fantasy consoles—small screens, limited palettes, simple audio, and a strong bias toward pixel-art games—without leaving the Python ecosystem. The project’s own documentation and repository make that intent explicit: Pyxel’s APIs and palette deliberately reference PICO-8 and TIC-80, but it is implemented as a Python-friendly engine rather than a standalone fantasy conso