Not necessarily, there are hundreds of embedded devices that can be programmed just like in the old days.
Arduino, ESP286, ESP32, <pick your own flavour>.
And since we are in the context of games and Nintendo, something like Arduboy.
Arduino, ESP286, ESP32, <pick your own flavour>.
And since we are in the context of games and Nintendo, something like Arduboy.
Both the Arduino libs and Espressif SDK are fairly big chunks of code.
Yes, you can program AVRs without libs too, but you did specifically say Arduino. It is also my understanding that ESPs are both bit obscure and fairly complex beasts to be managed without SDK.
While there are still some nice cases of simplicity in the embedded world, the complexity and layers of libraries and frameworks model is encroaching there too.
http://fingswotidun.com/avr/AvrAsm/Testbed/
It's pretty much a project to scratch the itch being described in this thread. It gives you an in-broswer 8-bit AVR based fantasy console and Assembler.
Like... Please move to an ARM MCU with a C codebase.
Of course you can pick up old parts which fell off a truck for cheaper but I'd rather not do that when I depend on these parts for many years to come.
That's why those applications use less known 4-bit processors.
Using c does come at the cost of some code compactness, but you can selectively optimize as the need arises.