alt Hacker NewsI'd say the GBA is the sweet spot for this.
The DS has you dealing with two cores you need to write a firmware for that have to communicate to do anything useful, a cartridge protocol to fetch any extra code or assets that wouldn't all fit into RAM at runtime, instruction and data caches, an MMU, ... And that's without mentioning some of the more complex peripherals like the touch screen and wifi.
All official games used the same firmware for one of the cores, a copy of which is embedded into every single cartridge ROM. There's some homebrew firmwares included in the respective SDKs, but they aren't well documented for standalone use.
Granted, all of the above isn't completely impossible, but if you think of how much code you'd need to get a simple demo (button input, sprite moving across the screen), especially for a beginner, the DS requires a nontrivial amount of code and knowledge to get started without an SDK. Meanwhile, you can do something similar in less than 100 lines of ASM/C for GBA.
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I agree, the GBA is a pleasure to work with. It's just a shame that the poor quality of the (stock) screens, low resolution, and lousy sound hardware make it feel like such a downgrade from the otherwise gnarlier and technically inferior SNES.
Agreed. I spent a lot of time programming the GBA in the early 2000s (back when the state of the art devkit was a flash cartridge writer with parallel cable...) and I consider it the last "grounded" console that Nintendo made, where you immediately and directly get to touch hardware right off the bat, without any gyrations. After having worked with the SNES in the 90s the GBA was a very familiar and pleasant platform to experience, in many ways similar to and built upon the SNES' foundation.