Nintendo will not change, maybe they will get out of the US.

Sony may sack their console departments and stick to everything else.

Microsoft is already getting over with Xbox.

Steam Deck and clones will become the new handhelds, along with (possibly) Android gaming phones with controllers.

PC architectures will displace console ones.

In a world where you have a choice other than a walled garden, are you surprised people pick an open platform? Exclusives are never a good thing for the consumer, it is a way to control the user and deprive them of choice. About time people started wising up.

great question. i think it would be super difficult to predict the future of gaming technology at this point

The worst aspect of the C64 was that the hardware was a mostly undocumented mystery zone.

This is simply false. The C64 was a completely open platform, everything was open, including how you programmed the special hardware directly. Even the included documentation was pretty good to get started, and included examples on how to program audio, graphics and sprites directly to the hardware.

For more advanced programming (assembly) you obviously needed to purchase the tools and documentation. The included book was only meant to get you started with the included BASIC. But the tools were cheap and documentation were extremely cheap compared to other computers, because it was a completely open platform.
The ability to have an assembler on a capsule in shadow ROM was extremely powerful.

The philosophy of Jack Tramiel was to put the hardware in the hands of users, and let them do whatever they wished without limitations. No closed garden at all.
Exactly because of that Jack Tramiel was a fucking hero IMO. And no other computer had more hacks and programming examples available at the time. And I bet it was a huge reason for why C64 was by far the best selling home computer for years.

Atari and Texas Instruments however at the time were closed, and therefore IMO useless.

Included book for C64:
https://www.commodore.ca/commodore-manuals/commodore-64-users-guide/

you're right. nowadays a beginner would have to sift through a bunch of websites to figure out how to do it.

Literally, the new Commodore 64. Comes with a book that teaches you Basic.

The book that came with the C-64 was a good primer for first-time computer users, but I ended up needing more and bought the "Commodore 64 Programmer's Reference Guide," which was far more useful, and then "Mapping the Commodore 64" and "Machine Language for Beginners."

Yes, I still have them. You never know... :D

Not a console, but PICO-8 can be installed on lots of stuff and uses lua.

Something like the Raspberry Pi 500+?

Terry Davis tried to do for the PC with TempleOS what the C64's BASIC and KERNAL did for its hardware.

Terry was all the more a mad lad because he didn't get to create the hardware spec he was working with.

Could you imagine someone doing the same as Commodore did but starting with 64-bit era hardware?

Taking it another direction, there are free and paid "easy programming" platforms that provide a sandbox not unlike a modern version of what it was like to program a C64.

At a pinch, DOSBox and a copy of QBASIC might suffice.

I believe a company that tried that... would be a pile of flames, rubble and pitchforks in minutes.

You want to get some computer experts to agree on the best language, and IDE to start with, or do we need to include every one... then deciding the order.

Unfortunately, that is not really possible.

The UEFI standard, a pdf that describes in detail the unified system that all motherbpards use during the boot process, is 1200+ pages long. And that's only one of the many subsystems in a modern system (that gigantic pdf tells you nothinf about PCI, about ACPI and usb, nor any other hardware peripheral). Also, since you are talking about a modern system, you also would need kernel, drivers and operating system calls documentation. All of these exist (for an open source OS like linux, and if you follow the aforementioned standards), but bundling them in a book, and keeping them uodated, would be just impossible.

...and a high percentage of those were copied illegally. I'm not judging, just stating a fact

The 64GS was one of Commodore's last gasps at trying to make some money using the 8-bit parts they still had left in stock. The whole thing was a disaster.

It wasn't based on the C64. It was a C64. Without a keyboard and some of the other ports missing. A fact that came to bite anyone who tried a C64 cartridge game that needed keyboard input.

And IIRC one of the games that came bundled with it was a game like that.

They were at least smart enough to have the BASIC startup pointer (the one that otherwise caused READY. to appear) in the ROM patched to go to a neat little graphic telling people to turn it off, plug in a game and turn it back on again.

What Commodore saved by releasing the GS, the customer ultimately paid by needing to buy games in a format more expensive than disk or tape that would run on a regular C64.

... and given the time period, lots of people were buying PCs and offloading their regular C64 hardware and a ton of games for the price of the GS and its handful of games. And that C64 would run any GS game that was likely to come out.