I have long thought that the GBA would be an excellent teaching platform for low-level programming if only Nintendo would allow it.
It has the feature that 100% of it's functionality is controlled through memory-mapped structs. You can define the whole hardware API in a single c header of struct/address pairs. To do anything, you write to those addresses and stuff happens. No magic, black-box libraries required (I guess there is the BIOS...)
It's also incredibly underpowered. You get a low number of clock cycles per frame to do everything. The lack of power, lack of cache and simple instruction set makes it an actually really good target for self-modifying code.
And, not least of all: it's literally a device built for having fun!
It has the feature that 100% of it's functionality is controlled through memory-mapped structs. You can define the whole hardware API in a single c header of struct/address pairs. To do anything, you write to those addresses and stuff happens. No magic, black-box libraries required (I guess there is the BIOS...)
It's also incredibly underpowered. You get a low number of clock cycles per frame to do everything. The lack of power, lack of cache and simple instruction set makes it an actually really good target for self-modifying code.
And, not least of all: it's literally a device built for having fun!