Fantasy consoles is a projects about playing and sharing tiny retrogames without hardware limitations.

Currently the most popular fantasy console is PICO-8 (https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php).
It feels like a real hardware, has amazing community and works on Windows, Linux, Mac and Raspberry Pi.
It's really fun to play on and can be great starting point for a game developer.

Specifications
Display: 128x128 16 colours
Cartridge Size: 32k
Sound: 4 channel chip blerps
Code: Lua
Sprites: 256 8x8 sprites
Map: 128x32 cels

All games for PICO-8 are DRM-free and open-source by design.

Introduction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXveyqOYB5w
Let's make a PICO-8 Game in 30 Minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJN83kSzh2k

Also take a look at TIC-80 (https://tic80.com/), another cool project which is becoming popular.

Related subreddits:
https://www.reddit.com/r/fantasyconsoles/
https://www.reddit.com/r/pico8/
https://www.reddit.com/r/tic80/

PICO-8 can also be purchased from Itchio:
https://lexaloffle.itch.io/pico-8

Also, the engine was included in the massive beneficent Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality from June 2020.
If it doesn't appear as owned on Itchio, you need to your downloads page for the bundle, find PICO-8 and click on its Download button.

There should also be an emulator for PICO-8 games without the programming part included, as well as an unofficial way to compile the games for Android, but sadly I can't dig information on them now.

You can just export any game to self-sufficient html5.
> export game.html

Also check out https://pico-8.github.io/awesome-PICO-8/, it has tons of good stuff.

Nice resources, thanks. Think I picked up that bundle so I will have to check it out. I also picked up dragonruby in one of those bundles, never enough time though.

I cant see whats the appeal for this. :(

Well lots of various reasons.
- it’s fairly easy and simple to get into (u real, unity take a lot of learning)
- the restrictions make you think about things differently and not just content pad. Like a lot of modern games
- older lot fondly remember the old days, I used to code spectrum games back in the day for instance
- this type of game doesn’t require teams of artists and modellers to create content
- to be a great game does not necessarily need to be dlss ray traced 100gb monstrosities

BTW, much appreciated platformer game Celeste was initially started as PICO-8 project.

Once again, community plays a big role here, there is some genuine joy in sharing your own game or gfx/music demo with friends.

In case you are looking for something more advanced, there is a modular fantasy consoles.
You can swap their chips to get different flavors of gfx and sound, i.e it's gonna sound like C64 but with NES graphics.
You can virtually create your own dream retro-console.
https://pixelvision8.github.io/Website/

Prior to that it was also included in one of the Humble Gamedev bundles on a higher tier (though due to a glitch lots of people also got licences on tier 1). Might be worth getting the thread title altered - I assumed this was some nutty thread about your personal fantasy console until I clicked by mistake.
Perhaps "Fantasy Consoles - Software to Play and code with"? - does appear you are expanding beyond pico 8 now.

Creating a set of limitations and working within it wouldn't be too hard. Hell you could probably strive to make new MS-DOS games, by limiting to 64k code, 64k sprite data, and 64k levels, 320x240x256 or 640x480x256 resolution; And a top speed of 60Mhz. That would make for some interesting 8/16bit games to make. Lots of NES games used less than that.

Though deciding on what would be the hardware target, say one of the Pi's as the lower limit, and then having ports for android/dos/windows wouldn't be too hard. Or maybe on a chromebook. (Chromebooks vary, but many are 2-core 2Ghz 2+Gb Ram) which would also be a good set of limits.

You can ask a blue should the need arise!

Important thing about comprehensive FCs like PICO-8 or PixelVision8, they provide full-featured dev/gfx/sound editors right out of the box. All in one integrated environment.
it's not just a set of limitations, advantages or tools, it's ecosystem.

Also you gonna get a very convenient distribution method that works seamlessly across all modern platforms including web. Without any technical knowledge about compilers and optimization.

Speaking of native DOS development, it's not that easy.
You most likely gonna need to dig into old-school C or even ASM to produce something highly optimized.
Not even talking about assets creation.
it's gonna be pretty challenging.
But hey, enthusiasts are still creating nice dos games and demos from time to time.
BTW, check this out https://github.com/rxi/lovedos