GB Studio is a great way to mess around with making a gameboy game! It exports a rom that can be flashed onto a blank cart, and played on real hardware—with recent versions adding gameboy color support. The recently hyped McDonald’s Grimace game was reportedly made with GB studio: https://gbstudiocentral.com/news/mcdonalds-celebrates-grimac...
Mentioning “knitting” and etc. is interesting, and reminds me of a variation on this theme:
Browsing BoingBoing in the 2010s, the maker-themed posts that gained traction were projects that were essentially structured as: An over complicated _______ but it’s actually a simple ________. For example, ‘a 3d printed diy wrist mounted display that actually only shows yesterdays’ tweets”.
In some ways today’s pattern of projects being either very complicated or very simple is a distillation/separation of the earlier pattern.
There are so many wonderful applications of this! I am always interested in tabletop card games, but I don’t want to manage running calculations for things like my hp, or current stat buffs. Something like this could open up complex interactions and game state, without burdening the player.
It took a bit of reading to make sure I was getting the right cart for the job, but the flasher hardware worked well.