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Open Console
{~drummyfish comments: Open consoles are how I got to suckless programming, they really taught me about the low-level, about optimizations and how to actually program efficiently on very limited hardware. I recommend you grab one of these.}
Open consoles are tiny Gameboy-like gaming consoles powered by free software and hardware, which have relatively recently seen a small boom. Examples include Arduboy, Pokitto or Gamebuino. These are NOT the raspberry pi handhelds that run Gameboy emulators.
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).
- Retro.
- Indie (sometimes developed by a single guy), often crowd-funded.
- Educational.
- DIY, often leaving assembly to the customer.
- 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 be programmed without proprietary software, GNU/Linux works just fine. 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
Most notable open consoles are listed here.
- Arduboy: ultra tiny, Arduino, 8bit 16 MHz, 2.5 KB RAM, 32 KB ROM, 1bit 64x32 display, great active community, many games
- Pokitto: NON-Arduino MCU, 32bit 48 MHz (can overclock), 36 KB RAM, 256 KB ROM, color 220x176 display, SD card, extension hats, great active community
- Gamebuino:
- Gamebuino META: Arduino, 32bit, 48 MHz, 32 KB RAM, 256 KB ROM, SD card, color 168x120 display
- Nibble: not very successful
- ESPboy:
- Tiny Arcade:
- UzeBox: