The closest modern equivalent to those old 8-bit computers is the TI-84 Plus CE calculator. It has a legit (no hacks) way to load binary executables. It goes fo

The closest modern equivalent to those old 8-bit computers is the TI-84 Plus CE calculator. It has a legit (no hacks) way to load binary executables. It goes for about $100. Like many old 8-bit computers, it comes with BASIC and an almost-ASCII character set. The screen is 320x240, just a tad bigger than those old 8-bit home computers usually had, though with 16-bit color. There is a USB port. You get a bit more RAM, with about 64 KiB of about 256 KiB available for your program. The screen is at a fixed address you can write to. The C compiler is fascinating. There is a uint24_t which maps to an unsigned int. This is because the EZ80 CPU is capable of ganging three 8-bit registers together to handle 24-bit data. Pointers are also 24-bit. The "short" and "long" types are of normal size, 16-bit and 32-bit. There is no alignment or padding. Serious stuff needs to be in assembly. The C compiler doesn't optimize very well. So that is 3 programming languages on a $100 device that happens to be useful for all sorts of normal school classes. The calculator is fine for the SAT, ACT, AP Statistics, AP Calculus, and now even the AP sciences.