LET'S ADD SOME CONSOLES TO THE LIST

Some of us are a bit insane and have decided to write games for actual consoles. I've written the start of a series of tutorials on how to make games for the NES, and I personally like the GBA. The advantages of writing a game for an old system or portable system is that not only does your game run on every platform an emulator has been written for, but it also works in the original console itself! Because of the nature of writing games for other people's consoles, there really isn't a chance of you doing something commercial unless you do something for the XBOX Live arcade and such. It's really for hobbyists and a ton of fun.

I keep seeing games on this site trying to emulate old hardware, and I can't think of a better way of doing this than actually writing a game for use in the old hardware to be played in an emulator! Haha!

However, I only request that GBA be added to the list since that's the most commonly homebrewed for platform I've seen and the easiest. There's some awesome tool-chains available and it's even not all that hard to do. Even if you've never written C before it's pretty simple- you write directly to the hardware. Despite all this, your gamers will most likely be running this in VisualBoyAdvance or something even though there are tons of carts out there you can put files on and run.

There's something awesome about running a game I made on my DS. I plan on making PC versions of everything I make in GBA though adding portable compiler macros to make it easier.

I have no clue what you would put as the icon, though. However, the problem is conveying to the user that the file they are going to download has to be opened in an emulator, and this would help.

Finally, it's not illegal or anything, it's only technically illegal when you get images of commercial ROMs for games you don't physically own (or BIOS binaries for consoles you don't physically own). The emulators themselves are legal. However, even if you were to write games with 100% original resources, the game image must have a copy of the Nintendo logo for it to run in a real GBA. You could have the ROM image not have the logo inside, but then it would only work in emulators. That's how they get you if you were a 3rd party game company selling unlicensed games (which happened a ton back in the NES days).

Pretty much it's like a virtual machine only for video games when you think about it. It's also magnitudes more fun than JAVA.