[vortico]

Here's what it looks like, since the website is down. http://www.moddb.com/engines/tilengine

This is actually a great idea if I understand it correctly: An engine built for modern platforms that emulates the limitations, gfx modes, emulates the sound engine of the NES/GBA, etc. without limiting CPU/video memory or CPU speed. I imagine it could be reimplemented as a subset of libSDL.

[Mahn]

Closed source though. The author seems to be distributing only compiled binaries.

[megamarc]

You're quite right. Tilengine is designed to emulate the inner working of 2D VDPs, so it has all their features. I preffer to say "features" than limitations because it's a very different way of rendering graphics compared to modern GPUs. But obviously this kind of graphics are technically more limited, of course.

It's not a full game engine, only a graphics engine: it doesn't offer sound or any other feature that would be outside of a graphics chip.

It's not an emulator of a particular hardware either: it's based on their working principles but it's a fresh implementation from the ground up.

[megamarc]

Regarding SDL, I don't want to tie it to a specific OS or graphics library. It acts as a back-end renderer and it will work on any host environment capable of providing a 32-bit video surface where to draw. In fact the internal windowing system of Tilengine (which is optional and can entirely be bypassed) already uses libSDL for display and user input.