The hardware is just a very small part of a project like this one. Of course in the game console the most important part are the games that you can play on it. And the most important part for the games is the development environment and libraries available for the game makers. The better and the easier to use the libraries, the more games you can make with the same effort, and the better they are. So software is actually more important here.

I'm basing my software on the CircuitPython project, which is itself based on MicroPython. But I need to add the parts that are specific to game development to it. One of the most important parts in this case is the tile and sprite engine. There is only so much you can do by drawing pixels directly on the screen, after all.

The library for that is now published at https://github.com/pewpew-game/circuitpython-stage and the part of it that needs to be compiled into CircuitPython is waiting to be merged into the main repository — you will still need to build your own firmware to enable it, as it's not generally useful on other boards, of course.

This is just the first version, that supports tile grids and sprites. There is a lot more to add there — advanced dirty rectangles handling, collisions, text layers, menus, etc. I will work on that gradually, as I'm working on the example games.