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Razengantoday at 12:37 AM3 repliesview on HN

Sort of a related tangent:

Some of the best gaming time in my life has been on handheld consoles, even when the games were available on PC or TV.

I wish there was a modern platform (not just a hobbyist Raspberry Pi kit or something) in the Switch or DS form factor, that boots straight into a coding environment like the legendary Commodore 64 and other "computer-consoles" of that era, with a central app store for indie devs to publish to for free. Add in dedicated support from a game engine like Godot, and I think something like that could spark a renaissance of solo devs/buddy teams experimenting with new game ideas and stuff.


Replies

bananaboytoday at 2:38 AM

There is the commander x16 from the 8-bit guy https://www.commanderx16.com/ although it’s not in a handheld form factor.

dontlaughtoday at 2:38 AM

Probably the closest thing is a Steam Deck with a custom Linux distro.

aspenmayertoday at 1:22 AM

> I wish there was a modern platform (not just a hobbyist Raspberry Pi kit or something) in the Switch or DS form factor, that boots straight into a coding environment like the legendary Commodore 64 and other "computer-consoles" of that era, with a central app store for indie devs to publish to for free.

I’m not sure if this will do what you want, but it is Linux on a DS! No active developers at the moment. They have instructions to build your own images as well as some software built for it.

https://www.dslinux.org/