[arantius]

> It is really asstonishing how dev hostile those game consoles were...

What's actually astonishing is the range of things that seem strange at first, but are actually very clear and logical, IF you also understand the historical context. The path that led reasonable people to make these decisions. Here, see the comments elsewhere about how licensing worked for physical cartridges (they were expensive -- open source cartridge games doesn't make much sense). Plus a dash of copy protection and especially, read into the video game crash of the 80s. This was part of the plan to avoid shovelware (which arguably made Nintendo the success it was).

> The games would surely have been prettier as a result.

What are you basing this on? 80s and 90s era console hardware was quite restricted, and the software we got did I think all that the hardware could do.