A fantasy console is a machine that never existed: its creators defined its limits — resolution, colour palette, number of sound channels, cartridge size — and then wrote the emulator that goes with it. Those deliberate constraints are the whole point: they force creativity, and most of these platforms ship with their own editor, which makes them game consoles and creation tools at the same time. PICO-8 and TIC-80 are the best known and enjoy a catalogue of several thousand free games.
The Arduboy is a special case in this list: it is a genuine little console with a monochrome OLED screen, built around an Arduino board, whose games fit in a few kilobytes. Vircon32 is an imaginary 32-bit console with a complete, fully documented architecture. All of these platforms being extremely light, they run effortlessly on any machine supported by Recalbox.
New in Recalbox 10.1: Vircon32 joins Recalbox.
| System | Author / publisher | Year |
|---|---|---|
| Arduboy | Kevin Bates | 2016 |
| LowRes NX | Timo Kloss | 2017 |
| Lutro | Libretro | 2015 |
| PICO-8 | Lexaloffle | 2015 |
| TIC-80 | Nesbox | 2017 |
| Vircon32 | Carra | 2023 |
| WASM-4 | Bruno Garcia | 2021 |
The games on these platforms are free and freely distributed in the vast majority of cases, published directly by their authors. It is the best way to fill Recalbox legally, without looking for a single rom.