Nintendo DS development
Occasionally I play with devkitPRO to get code running on the Nintendo DS. This homebrew SDK is really low-level. When the developer-friendly abstraction includes symbols like VRAM_A_MAIN_BG_0x06000000, you know you’re working at a pretty tedious level.
I’ve done embedded development before, but the impression I get is that NDS development is hard. I sometimes wonder what the official Nintendo SDK looks like. I’m sure it’s a bit more abstract than remembering which processor to ask for which button inputs. I’m not sure if it’s this low-level because of the weird hardware peculiarities of the DS, or just a missing layer above libnds.
When you come across a good homebrew Nintendo DS application, be impressed: It’s like writing a dekstop application in assembly.