What is 'low-end' hardware?

Assembly will help you understand computers better than your average programmer, but will it get you notoriety today? Probably not.

I highly suggest instead of buying a convoluted, overpriced, proprietary, educational microcontroller crap console like XGS, you go for a real commercial console! Your favorite 8 or 16-bit console or handheld would be the best place to start, since tools and emulators are free, and if you want to move to physical hardware, you can build an EPROM cart and buy a programmer to play your game on the real thing.

To further put down XGS, for the price of a XGS Pico, you could buy a FPGA board and not only develop your own game, but develop your own 64-bit console to run it... Sure you get a lot of documentation and support with XGS, but since XGS systems are literally software defined virtual consoles, with software limited constraints, you'd be no worse off developing a game for your PC without any constraints or for a console with many hardware constraints both for free.

 

I coded games consoles for 16 years but I just don't enjoy C or C++ (also my C is flaky). I wish I had the Tomb Raider CGB source to put onto the net, I was VERY proud of that - Not a cycle or bus-width wasted. I dumped the entire screen each game-loop to allow the whole image to animate. It goes without saying I dumped the sprites each game loop.

I guess Java is the next step, then...