CHIPnGo VS austral

CHIPnGo A custom-built CHIP-8 hand-held gaming console powered by a STM32 microcontroller.

It's essentially complete now (other than some planned firmware tweaks) and you can check out the source code on GitHub. You can also see a video if it in action here.

I ask because I recently made a console for CHIP-8 which is an old 8-bit “fantasy console” by writing a CHIP-8 emulator for a STM32 MCU. So games still have that 8-bit limitation like you’re going for but the STM32 has a bit more power than actual 8-bit MCUs which is useful for working with the display and stuff.

Now that I have a nearly complete prototype for my CHIP-8 game console that I've been working on, I wanted to attempt to create a custom PCB to truly make it portable.

A couple months ago, I decided I wanted to learn more about embedded software development so I thought it would be cool to port my emulator to a STM32 MCU and try to build a handheld game console since CHIP-8 never existed as an actual standalone physical machine. I have a working prototype and the firmware (which I wrote from scratch so it took quite awhile to get right) is basically done (though I will likely do some refactoring and add a bit more robustness) which can be found here. Next step is to design a PCB and add battery power to have a no-shit portable game console.

> But these days folks are mostly used to the C style syntax.

Mostly, but I'm told the new Austral[1] language has syntax very similar to that of Pascal's.

1: https://austral-lang.org/

For the first couple of items on the list, Austral might be a language worth considering:

https://austral-lang.org

It's new so it obviously doesn't have the community of libraries to use, but it does have a very friendly and accessible Pascal-like syntax, while also having a state of the art linear type system.

For something more new look at Austral.

https://austral-lang.org has linear types and doesn’t use RAII but it doesn’t have defer.