I'm a huge Pico-8 fan and suggest that anyone that is interested in Pico-8 watch Joseph White's (the creator) Practice (NYU game designer conference) talk about

I'm a huge Pico-8 fan and suggest that anyone that is interested in Pico-8 watch Joseph White's (the creator) Practice (NYU game designer conference) talk about the design philosophy of Pico-8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87jfTIWosBw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87jfTIWosBw. The TLDW of the talk is that he explicitly tried to built a "cozy" game development environment with enough constraints in place to encourage creativity without the stress of starting from a completely blank canvas. At the end Scott Hanselman has a footnote about building or buying a physical Pico-8 console. One thing that is missing is most Pico-8 consoles focus on the play aspect of Pico-8, not the creation aspect of Pico-8 which is just as important to me if not more so. I own a PocketCHIP and the device is a decent handheld computer, but there are many aspects of it that make it painful to use, not due to the form factor but due to the quality of various components. The keyboard is bad although there are a variety of solutions, including 3D printed covers (https://www.thingiverse.com/glitchpudding/collections/pocketchip https://www.thingiverse.com/glitchpudding/collections/pocket...) or rubber feet (https://androidarts.com/Amiga/PRBOOM.jpg https://androidarts.com/Amiga/PRBOOM.jpg). The quality of the screen and touch is also not great, so it was hard for me to draw pixel art on the device. I'd like to build a custom handheld computer primarily for Pico-8 development built around this display https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/hyperpixel-4-square https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/hyperpixel-4-square, probably using a Raspberry Pi Zero. One of my issues with Pocketchip was that the entire system felt kind of slow\high latency and more compute might be one of the only fixes for that, so rpi zero might not cut it. I'd probably have to print my own case and I still haven't found a great keyboard solution. The best option I've seen is Teensy Thumb keyboard (https://www.pjrc.com/handheld-tactile-switch-keyboard/ https://www.pjrc.com/handheld-tactile-switch-keyboard/), but I might go with a standard bluetooth thumb keyboard. If anyone on HN has built a handheld computer or has good resources I'd love to hear about it. My goal is to get something that feels like a Nintendo handheld (Switch, DS, GB) with good feeling physical thumb keyboard and can also be used to draw pixel art.