[markus_zhang]

Never done anything but I think the gameboy family is a good choice. Unlike NES or SNES which use assembly heavily, we can use C for the GBA. There are also great communities devoted for them.

[Agingcoder]

The nes is a simple but extremely elegant machine. Assembly isn't a problem, since the cpu is very simple, I recommend playing with it.

[markus_zhang]

Definitely. I guess one can climb the ladder by first programming the NES and then SNES and just go up, maybe even learn some Japanese to immerse in the life of a Japanese game developer in the 80s/90s. Could be a long but interesting side project.

[saagarjha]

You can, but it’s pretty lacking in registers.

[snvzz]

It's still not a PIC12.