Best Game Engines for Retro Consoles

There are many reasons to make a game for an old console:

• You want the game to play on a real console for the unique retro appeal.
• You want to play with the creative limitations of making a game to real hardware.
• You want to go closer to metal than Fantasy Consoles.

For those who want to tackle this challenge, there is a class of Retro Game Engines that allows developers to create games for real hardware, in many ways replacing the DevKits of the olden' days. Some of those engines make life much easier by removing some of the freedom you'd have otherwise - other engines act as a thin wrapper around the real hardware API, giving you full control of your game.

Whatever you are looking for and for the Retro console you want, here are some of the best Retro Game Engines available right now. All of the engines and devkits listed are still being developed and pushed forward by community support.

The Approachable Engines

Here are the Retro Game Engines that are easier to approach if you are just getting your feet wet into Retro game programming:

For gameboy, GB Studio is the most popular Retro Game Engine, and it has a real community of developers making Gameboy games on Itch.io since the engine can export both to Gameboy and to Web (creating a small emulator wrapper on top of your game), thus making it easier for anyone to play the game. It gives enough tools to create simple games using the visual editor, but with enough tinkering you can make quite complex Gameboy games. And with the in-editor sound creating tools, it feels as close to a Fantasy Console as possible, but exporting to real hardware.

Much simpler than GB Studio, but a tool you can use in the browser and that also exports to the web using a wrapper around your NES rom. It's mainly targeted for simpler puzzle-like games, but if you want to play around the idea of making a small game for the NES, this might be the perfect engine.

A proprietary Engine and not a cheap one at that (currently sitting at $36 bucks), but it is still in constant development, has a growing community on Facebook, and official learning content on the website. And like the previous engines, if you want to export your game to web, you can do so via the Nesmaker portal Retro Verse.

A free game engine you can use on the Web that exports games to Atari 2600 using visual programming similar to Scratch. Atari 2600 is a much limited hardware than even GameBoy, so there are only so many things you can do. But VCS Game Maker makes it quite easy to explore the platform, and it already includes many of the basic tools for simple arcade games.

Here be Dragons

Below are the SDKs that give the most freedom to developers, but the tradeoff of being closer to the metal is that they also require more programming effort. All the SDKs require knowledge in C, the universal language for low level programming, and you might need to install a complete toolchain to compile your code into the target platform.

Not associated with Python by any means, Pyrite64 is the friendliest of the Engines listed in this section. It's a full-fledged Game Engine with an Editor that adds runtime, scene-management, rendering, collision, audio; you still have to program in C++, but as a scripting language for the game interactions.

GBA Microjam '23, made for Gameboy Advance

The only C++ engine of the bunch and built on top of devkitARM toolchain, it's a very complete engine to Gameboy Advance with C++ quality-of-life features, profiling, and multiple examples to learn from. You can find many Gameboy Advance development resources and community support in https://gbadev.net.

JoEngine offers a complete package to make games for Sega Saturn, and although it doesn't have a full-fledged Editor, it does have a Map Editor for 2D games.

The development kit that powers GB Studio and other engines, it gives you complete freedom to make games for 6502 and adjacent consoles such as Gameboy and NES. It has an incredible showcase page with real games, some of them with physical releases.

Another development kit that includes a library and a compiler/linker toolchain, but targeting the SNES. It has good references in the repository documentation if you're just starting out on SNES programming, like the SNES Development Wiki.

The go-to SDK for the Nintendo 64 console to a full C11 programming experience. It is quite complete and feature many performance and compression features (necessary if you want to make a complete Nintendo 64 game), but be aware that as of today, some 3D API is only available on its Preview branch, which contains a full OpenGL 1.1 renderer implementation.

Xeno Crisis, made for Mega Drive in 2019

The main SDK supporting Mega Drive. It also contains invaluable reference material for the Mega Drive hardware in the repository README.

Stygian Quest, for Sega Master System

The devkit for the 8-bit era of Sega. It has a thriving community living in https://www.smspower.org producing new games every year.