Does anyone know of an open-source version of PICO-8? I don't even care about any of the features, as long as there's an active community around the project.
You should checkout WASM4⁽¹⁾, an Open Source WebAssembly-based fantasy console with 4 colors and a 160x160 screen.
One of its advantages over TIC-80 is that you can program games in any language that compiles to WebAssembly. The games are tiny pure Wasm "carts" that can run on any Wasm runtime, from the browser to Nintendo 3DS.
To all the sibling repliers:
PICO-8, TIC-80, Load81 and probably others are somewhat Lua oriented.
What is it about Lua that makes it so popular in this area?
That's not really a fantasy console though -- it's just a framework for making games. What makes a "fantasy console" like Pico-8 or Tic-80 is that it is an entire environment that you develop and run your code in, as if it were an emulator of a system, albeit one that never actually existed.