What is the possibility of running this on very minimal hardware?

I want to create something like one of the "fantasy" consoles like TIC80 etc, but running on actually minimal hardware (arduino probably doesnt have the memory needed, but maybe something like the new raspberry pi pico). Something low end, cheap, with a smallish screen (320 x 200 or so). I can certainly put the hardware together and program it directly in raw C or micro python, but it would be nice to have a game framework on it, sprite editor, etc.. so you could program actual games ON it, just like an old school PC. A little machine to learn programming on, play some fun games, and not be distracted by the honypot of the internet and such...

Hi,

The platforms you're proposing are too constrained, not for Tilengine itself, but even for the kind of "editors" you want to run on them. They're just microcontrollers with memory in the order of kilobytes -not megabytes-, and don't have display buses. All display kits for these devices are based on slow serial buses, so their screens are really small, mostly character based. So there's no way to use a microcontroller board as a general purpose development platform, they're simply not designed for that.

I would try the Raspberry Pi Zero (https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-zero/). It's a humble platform but powerful enough to use it a s a general purpose platform, if you stick to lightweight applications. I use a Raspberry Pi 3 classic (2016) that is more powerful than the Zero, but not much more, and it can run Tilengine samples 420x240 at 60 fps without stressing the CPU.

Yeah and thats the direction I might go. But the raspberry pi pico is a nice in between because it has enough ram  (264k) and rom (2mb) to do this, but not sure if it could handle tilengine (sounds like you would need a SDL driver specifically for it).

In practical terms, the cost of a PI zero is not a significant blocker. I just dont like the idea of having to run linux in order to run something retro... :)

You will need an OS -be it Unix/Linux, Windows or whatever- to run any general-purpose application like an editor or an emulator. You go to the metal in plain C on a microcontroller when you do application-specific firmware tied to a particular hardware design. I'm sorry you don't like the idea of using a general OS to run applications, but it's how things are since the early 70s :-)

Tilengine itself doesn't require any special hardware. You need SDL2 for the window, but that's an optional component. Going to the metal, your target hardware should provide a 32-bit RGBA framebuffer and video output bus. The Paspberry Pico doesn't have one. There are some high-end microcontrollers with framebuffer and video, but most common configuration is to use a specialized display controller with external RAM and a bus. So, if you ever manage to build an embedded system with such configuration and over 500 MHz CPU clock, you could compile and run Tilengine on it without any OS.