1989
EASY
Game Boy
C / SM83
The recommended start. Simple hardware, mature tooling.
▶ SELECT YOUR PLATFORM
18 systems, one server
Every console below builds, runs, and inspects through the exact same tools. Difficulty is the honest "how hard to build a game" rating from an agent that actually shipped across the lineup.
8-BIT & 16-BIT The classics
1998
EASY
Game Boy Color
C / SM83
The Game Boy with a real color palette.
1982
EASY
Commodore 64
C / 6502
40 years of docs, forgiving hardware. A great first 8-bit.
1985
EASY
Sega Master System
C / Z80
Simple Z80 + VDP. Near-twin of the Game Gear.
1990
EASY
Game Gear
C / Z80
Same VDP as the Master System, smaller window.
1983
EASY
MSX / MSX2
C / Z80
Boots on the open C-BIOS — no proprietary ROM.
1983
HARD
NES / Famicom
C / 6502
Everyone knows it; the PPU is unforgiving. Friendlier to hack.
1990
MED
Super Nintendo
C / 65816
65816 + Mode 7. Big ROMs often skip compression.
1988
MED
Sega Genesis
C (SGDK) / 68000
SGDK is a real C engine. The easiest system to HACK.
1987
MED
PC Engine
C / HuC6280
65C02 superset + HuC6270 VDC. HuCards need no BIOS.
2001
MED
Game Boy Advance
C (libtonc)
32-bit ARM, comfy C with the well-documented Tonc lib.
1989
MED
Atari Lynx
C / 6502
Color handheld; Suzy/Mikey display-list sprite engine.
1986
HARD
Atari 7800
C / 6502
MARIA display-list graphics, ~100 sprites, sparse docs.
1977
HARDEST
Atari 2600
6502 asm (dasm)
Race the beam. 128 B RAM, every scanline counted. Brutal, iconic.
2024
MED
GameTank
C / 6502
Clyde Shaffer's OPEN-hardware W65C02S console. Modern & friendly.
3D The deep end
1996
3D
Nintendo 64
C (mips-gcc)
MIPS R4300 + RDP/RSP. Renders on glide64 through the real GPU.
1994
3D
Sony PlayStation
C (mips-gcc)
MIPS R3000. Beetle PSX HW on the GPU; OpenBIOS embedded.
1998
3D
Sega Dreamcast
C (sh-gcc)
SH-4 + PowerVR2. Boots an ELF on Flycast reios HLE.
3D consoles render through your real GPU (headless OpenGL/EGL, no browser) and get full analysis + decompile — not byte-exact reassembly yet.
FANTASY Pure vibes
2015
EASIEST
PICO-8
Lua (FAKE-08)
The gentlest on-ramp: carts are plain-text Lua. Runs on the open-source FAKE-08 player — no BIOS.
Grab a platform and go
$ npx romdevtools