less_retarded_wiki/open_console.md

Open Console

{ Open consoles are how I got into suckless programming, they taught me about the low-level, optimizations and how to actually program efficiently on very limited hardware. I recommend you grab one of these. ~drummyfish }

Open consoles (also indie handhelds etc.) are tiny GameBoy-like gaming consoles mostly powered by free software and free hardware, which have relatively recently (some time after 2015) seen a small boom. Examples include Arduboy, Pokitto or Gamebuino. These are NOT to be confused with the Raspberry Pi (and similar) handhelds that run GameBoy/PS1/DOS emulators but rather custom, mostly FOSS platforms running mostly their own community made homebrew games.

In summary, open consoles are:

• GameBoy-like gaming consoles (but also allow and encourage non-gaming uses).
• Powered by free hardware and free software (usually Arduino plus a custom library, although mostly advertised as open source and not so strict about freedom). Schematics are a lot of times available.
• Retro.
• Indie (sometimes developed by a single guy), often crowd-funded.
• Educational.
• DIY, sometimes leaving assembly of the kit to the customer (assembled kits can usually be ordered for extra price).
• Very cheap (compared to proprietary mainstream consoles).
• Hacking friendly.
• Typically embedded ARM.
• Bare metal (no operating system).
• Pretty low spec hardware (RAM amount in kilobytes, CPU frequency in MHz).
• Relying on user created games which are many times also free-licensed.

Recommended consoles for starters are Arduboy and Pokitto which are not only very well designed, but most importantly have actual friendly active communities.

These nice little toys are great because they are anti-modern, simple, out of the toxic mainstream, like the oldschool bullshit-free computers. This supports (and by the low specs kind of "forces") suckless programming and brings the programmer the joy of programming (no headaches of resizable windows, multithreading etc., just plain programming of simple things with direct access to hardware). They offer an alternative ISA, a non-x86 platform without botnet and bloat usable for any purpose, not just games. Besides that, this hobby teaches low level, efficiency-focused programming skills.

Programming

Open consoles can typically be programmed without proprietary software (though officially they may promote something involving proprietary software), GNU/Linux mostly works just fine (sometimes it requires a bit of extra work but not much). Most of the consoles are Arduino-based so the Arduino IDE is the official development tool with C++ as a language (C being thankfully an option as well). The IDE is "open-source" but also bloat; thankfully CLI development workflow can be set up without greater issues (Arduino comes with CLI tools and for other platforms gcc cross-compiler can be used) so comfy programming with vim is nicely possible.

If normies can do it, you can do it too.

Some consoles (e.g. Arduboy, Pokitto and Gamebuino META) have their own emulators which make the development much easier... or rather bearable. Without an emulator you're forced to constantly reupload the program to the real hardware which is a pain, so you want to either use a nice LRS library such as SAF or write your game to be platform-independent and just make it run on your development PC as well as on the console (just abstract the I/O and use SDL for the PC and the console's library for the console -- see how Anarch does it).

Open Console List

Some notable open consoles (which fit the definition at least loosely) are listed here. Symbol meaning:

• A = Arduino
• C = great active community
• * = recommended
• + = many games/programs
• - = discontinued

name	CPU	RAM (K)	ROM (K)	display	notes
Arduboy	8b 16 MHz	2.5	32	64x32 1b	* A C +, tiny
Gamebuino	8b 16 MHz	2	32	84x48 1b	+ A -, SD
Pokitto	32b 48 MHz	36	256	220x176	* C +, ext. hats, SD
ESPboy	32b 160 MHz	80	4000	128x128	A
GB META	32b 48 MHz	32	256	168x120	A + -, SD
Nibble	32b 160 MHz	80	4000	128x128	A, AAA bat.
UzeBox	8b 20 MHz	4	64	360x240	C, +
Tiny Arcade	32b				A
Thumby	32b 133 MHz	264	2000	72x40	RPI (RP2040)
Agon	8b 18 MHz	512		640x480

TODO: Retro Game Tiny, Adafruit PyGamer, ... see also https://github.com/ESPboy-edu/awesome-indie-handhelds

See Also

• fantasy console
• DOS