fantasy VS Animator-Pro

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

I like to start up Dosbox-X or one of the virtual Amiga environments that comes bundled with Amiga forever. Definitely cozy.

More often I use some old application, like the nowadays BSD-licensed ex-Autodesk Animator. It is fun to figure it out and more fun than modern applications in many ways. I even bought an old used book about it and read cover to cover. Limited compared to modern graphics software, but "cozy" is a great way to describe the experience.

https://github.com/AnimatorPro/Animator-Pro

But I think very limited and objectively worse GUIs can be fun for inspiration and to get other styles. I love to play around with Autodesk Animator. The workflow is kind of awkward but being forced to always think ahead of what you want to do and compose images of small parts (because there are no layers and many other limitations) it becomes more like a fun puzzle/game to get anything done (and the resulting FLI files can be imported into Aseprite for more serious editing!).

Other tools may be a bit more lacking. Not sure if any reasonably modern version control system works. Graphics editors will be a bit old (but Autodesk Animator was released open source and is quite great really and no idea how fun sfx editors and other gamedev tools from last century are to use today.

Autodesk Animator can save and load PIC files. But it looks like your header is different from what I see in one of those I happened to have.

Was it https://github.com/AnimatorPro/Animator-Pro ?

I took the time a few years ago to learn a bit about how to use Autodesk Animator (it was released with a BSD license some ~10 years ago and can be downloaded legally for free these days). Was really impressed with the GUI. Just press a single key to open the menu that begins with that letter, then the first letter of the menu-item you want to use. They managed to use only words that begin with unique letters while still making a lot of sense. Plus some other single-key shortcuts. And many, to me, unusual design choices everywhere, but it all makes sense and is consistent in a way that after a few hours I was not bothered at all by the fact that nothing was like a modern GUI, and there was definitely nothing about using more modern GUI conventions I can think of that would make it more pleasant to work with.

https://github.com/AnimatorPro/Animator-Pro

Wild guess is that a GIF without a color table would typically render using the default VGA palette back in the day? I tried to open it in dosbox in PictView but it displayed that GIF in grayscale (not all black at least!) (that application is from 2015 though and might not be representative for how real 1989-era applications would have done?). Then I tried the "crop" tool that comes with Autodesk Animator, because I know the application itself only supports GIF87a in 320x200, but crop also said the image had unknown version.