I’d love to see something like this but designed to run on esp32 or raspberry pi 2530. Either can handle basic HDMI and USB. Or a little <$100 laptop with a 7” display.

Easy to think raspberry pi, but with a full Linux you won’t get that intrinsic understanding that you fully control the hardware, you never control the “bare metal” unless you are a much more advanced user.

IMHO the feeling of not being in full control of your computing device is not a good starting point. I’m very fortunate to have started out on my 8kb BASIC machine.

Yes, they are more powerful than classical MS-DOS PCs, so there is plenty of juice in them.

I have been thinking along those lines myself.

I have been playing around with a per scanline generated display on a rp2350 outputting to a tiny LCD. I think there's potential for some pretty fancy stuff on HDMI. A 2350 with PSRAM, HDMI connector plus a MicroSD for bulk filesytem, and USB for input could be quite a fun micro PC.

I would be tempted to make somthing that had a second RP2350 with its own PSRAM sitting unutilized just as a temptation to users to figure out how to get more out of the gadget and learn about different multiprocessing architectures.

One of these https://www.waveshare.com/core2350b.htm

With one of these https://www.waveshare.com/rp2350-matrix.htm

Mounted on top, and an HDMI connector squeezed in somewhere,

I am a bit reminded of what GeoWorks Ensemble managed on a 640k 8086. Theoretically you could make a tiny system like this do even more.

Not sure on the performance but it might be possible to port this Mini Micro to those platforms.

why not just use a vintage computer or game console then?