fantasy VS dflat

There are plenty of alternatives you could find on [1] in the context of fantasy console, almost all of them, oss or proprietary, active or dormant. And honestly many of them were inspired by PICO-8.

[1]: https://github.com/paladin-t/fantasy

Also look into fantasy game consoles. They are emulators of fake game consoles that you make your own games for using built in tools and they use a variety of languages. They're usually free and/or open source, too. There's a master list here but to save you a click, the most popular/favorite ones are:

I know that there are a bunch of "fantasy consoles" that provide constrained programming environments more or less similar to developing on older consoles. Pico-8 and TIC-80 are two well-known ones. Quadplay looks interesting to me, probably a bit more powerful than the SNES, but in the ballpark, in terms of resolution and color capabilities.

If you're interested in small games, Google "fantasy console" and look through this list. A fantasy console is a collection of programming and art tools that limit and simplify the development process. They're often inspired by early home computer systems (70s-90s) that had great hobby programming scenes. Some are free (as in freedom or at least free beer) some are paid, none should be expensive.

Here's a list of Fantasy Consoles, which is what your post sounds like it's describing.

Not an exhaustive list but check this out: https://github.com/paladin-t/fantasy

As much as I love Lua its very difficult to shoe-horn into an 8-bit CPU, especially with limited RAM... but there are other efforts to bring more modern languages to these platforms, and one that strikes me as interesting is dflat, from 6502Nerd:

https://github.com/6502Nerd/dflat/wiki

(See language description here: https://github.com/6502Nerd/dflat/wiki/2.-Language-Descripti...)

Maybe something like this could evolve/be adapted for continued modern development needs?