Fantasy consoles are 8 or 16 bits like virtual machines, with programming language and that often include tools to add graphics, audio and music. This is a funny world, and a good mean to develop an interactive or multimedia application a quick way. Limited resources, often very simple script language (like Lua as an exemple), allow to quickly prototype things, by only going toward essential things.

Link to lists of Fantasy Consoles

• Paladin-t Fantasy on Github

Open sources Fantasy Consoles

TIC-80

My favorite for now, see my own creations, it is since one of the Demoscene favorite tools.

• TIC-80 (Wiki), mainly Lua, lot of languages (python, Ruby, WASM, wren, etc) , SDL, 240↗160 16 colors + copperlist, 4 channels, multiplateformes (Lin, Mac, Win), barebone et libretro)
• Helpful lib, tic80-boilerplate allow to concatenate multifiles project/libs to a final TIC-80 card

IT become popular in DemoScene with the LoveByte Battlegrounds (SizeCoding.org optimization for Byte Battle) and Tiny Code Christmas, that give every years since 2022, tutorials and exercies-demoparty. See also Superogue blog about sizecoding demos

• Sizecoding.org page about TIC-80

Meg4

• Meg4 (GPL3+) Documentation Meg4 sources C, BASIC? (pseudo-)assembly, Lua. VGA mode-13 (320×200×8bit, 256 colours from 32 bits ARGB), 8b/44KHz, 31 wav + 64 fm support amiga mod. and Milkyway compatible for music, 1024 8x8 sprites, UTF-8, multiple "platforms", SDL, GLFW, raylib, sokol, allegro, libretro, etc
• Gamercade, Webassembly console, with various resolutions/palettes, fm+sample synthesizer, 8channel for music, 8 for sfx

Minicube (and Byte)

• Minicube (documentation) and [Byte][https://github.com/nullptropy/byte) are 6502 assembly based fantasy consoles.

See C64 Assembly page for more informations about 65xx (including 6502) introduction and doc.

MircoW8

• MicroW8 (source on Github, Doc) is a fantasy console programmable in WebAssembly (WASM) but also CurlyWas (made by the author of MicroW8, C, Rust (docs) and Zig (doc). It can runs on Web (obviously as WebAssembly application), standalone, or in libretro.

• Exemples on Sizecoding.org

• In Tiny Code Chrismas since 2024

ByteBeat

Procedural music in few bytes

• Bytebeat

emulated old computers

See the page retrocomputing