I've done a bit of NES programming and really enjoy trying to cram stuff into such a tiny system.<p>One benefit of developing games for these old systems is that they are not moving targets. For hobby programming, you probably don't want to keep testing and recompiling old stuff to keep up with OS updates.<p>Even better, you'll have a small army of emulator developers making sure your games will work forever on every new platform. That includes browsers, since there are Javascript emulators for many systems. If your games are particularly tricky to emulate, that's no problem. They will probably be added to everyone's test suites.
There's the NESMaker community that creates NES games using a toolkit:<p><a href="https://www.thenew8bitheroes.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.thenew8bitheroes.com/</a><p>Games that may be created with it (the NESMaker site links to it, but it's not clear if all games were made with it or not):<p><a href="https://theretroverse.com/play/" rel="nofollow">https://theretroverse.com/play/</a>
> One of my favorite games for the NES was Ninja Gaiden.<p>> My kids helped design some of the characters, and they love to play it together, which makes it a lot of fun as a family.<p>> My family (my wife and 4 kids) loves hanging out with neighbors at Morrissey Park in Champaign. Champaign has great parks, and we’re fortunate enough to have a neighborhood community that regularly gets together at the park in the evenings. I also volunteer with my local church and am learning to ride the unicycle.<p>Dude has been winning at life nonstop.
I could see how writing code a low power console could be fun. I enjoy optimizing code just for the fun of the exercise.<p>Also, I believe Atari carts could be written with standard off the shelf EEPROM hardware. My dad told stories of trading floppy disks full of ROM dumps through the inner office mail system with work friends, and then burning the them to carts.