This looks like a place it’d be nice to see a picture of a Pokitto. It seems to be right up the Pokitto’s alley - educational, easy to get started, etc. I suspect that it may take $'s to get it done, though.
Anything similar possible? Having played with this on App Inventor and for the Micro:Bit, it’s not bad. Certainly easier to deal with than C.
So there is now MakeCode Arcade https://arcade.makecode.com . Which describe
itself as casual game editor based on Microsoft MakeCode.
The source code of the editor is available on Github
https://github.com/Microsoft/pxt-arcade . So in theory you can add new MCUs to
MakeCode Arcade. There is documentation for it at
https://github.com/Microsoft/pxt-arcade/blob/master/docs/hardware/adding.md .
But at the moment only the following MCUs are compatible to support the Arcade game engine:
They consider to support N840 based on Nordic NRF52840 (Cortex M4F,
256kB of RAM, 1024kB of flash, 64MHz) in the “future”.
As you can see, these are all Cortex M4F. This and the following criteria:
[…]
Screen data for resolution and depth at 160x120x4 bits takes a little under
10kB. We need at least two sets of screen data for double-buffering and the
user is very likely to use two or three more for various sprite operations.
This, together with heap fragmentation concerns, effectively requires the
hardware to have at least 96kB of RAM, though more is clearly better. In
addition, 512kB of flash and 64MHz or more are recommended, but these
usually follow from the RAM size.
[…]
The pokitto is nice little device based on Cortex-M0+ processor, running at 48
MHz with 256kB program memory – 36kB RAM – 4kB EEPROM,
but doesn’t match the above criteria at the moment. I don’t know
enough about the Arcade game engine, maybe it can be further optimized to run
on a low power Cortex M0+. @jonne and the pokitto community did a amazing job
with the display to run hires games with high performance. But I don’t know if
this could help to support the Arcade game engine on the pokitto at the moment.