Wii U SDBoot1 Exploit “paid the beak”

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.

> 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/

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

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

Sorry to double reply, but I wanted to make sure you also saw this: Linux (edit: and Android!) on a Switch.

https://switchroot.org/

Some SBC handhelds do support Pico-8 platform apparently, worth a try:https://youtu.be/R5jZRV2D-rM

Even if you had the machine, it is not enough.

What was magical about that coding environment is that you could go to the store and pick up a computing magazine and type in a game. Then you could play it and tweak it as you wanted. I have no idea what the equivalent would be today; the cost analogue I can think of is watching Mario maker or Minecraft videos and then implementing what you learn in your own world or level.

I think the golden years for this were around the PSP/DS homebrew scene circa 2006. I have some really fond memories of following the latest developments in the community, experimenting with toolchains, and general learning about programming and hardware.I was kinda playing around with C before this, but the scene really sparked a lifelong interest.