Gameduino (or how a $5 chip can outperform an Amiga :( )

[nicholas]

I know this has been mentioned before, but some probably haven't heard of this yet... So here it is, an ATMega328 (a very cheap 8bit micro controller) based board that really shows the age of the Amiga Hardware.

On a bright note, if you fell in love with the Amiga because of how easy and fun it was to program, and write your own games... you will love it!

http://excamera.com/sphinx/gameduino/

I love it, especially this demo!

http://excamera.com/sphinx/gameduino/samples/ball/index.html

[nicholas]

You don't have to learn about POSIX and OpenGL to program a game on Linux. For example, could use KidsRuby (which was recently featured on the Raspberry Pi blog) + Gosu. Take a look:
http://confreaks.net/videos/637-gogaruco2011-kidsruby-think-of-the-children?player=html5

PyGame is also very popular for getting started with making games:
http://pygame.org/news.html

There are tons of libraries like Gosu and PyGame that make game programming easy. Plus, the advantage of using libraries like that is that by the end of it, not only have you got a game, you've also taught yourself a versatile programming language for more practical tasks.

All valid points, but nothing beats banging the hardware directly which Gameduino seems perfect for.