GameBoy Graphics Part 2: Tile Maps [video]
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"Old" gaming systems are so interesting in their architecture, and consequently tricks that game developers had to do to eke out the necessary performance out of the hardware! I feel like since PS3's Cell processor (regardless of what you think of it), game consoles have been increasingly following more classic (desktop-like) architecture in the entire hardware stack, which has been to be honest great for cross-platform game engines and applications.
That is why I love implementing emulators of older systems for fun. I recommend the classic CHIP-8 for starting, it's well documented and can be written to play practically any game ROM in a couple of days.
I personally then graduated to a Game Boy (Color) emulator, and in particular the PPU (graphics part) was really tricky to get right but I felt like the tile maps, as described in this video, were such a great solution for the time and it was a real joy to implement.
Subscribing to this channel, hope it will one day get into some details about the Audio Processing Unit which has so little resources (even in the reference Pan Docs [0]) that I fear I would need to straight up port code from reference open-source emulators (so probably C) to get it working with no major bugs.
The current and last generation consoles from Microsoft and Sony are literally PC components. They're not just off-the-shelf PCs but they have definitely converged on PC technologies. The original Xbox might as well have just been a PC. So you're definitely not wrong there.