Fantasy Consoles are virtual machines designed to simulate the development constraints early game developers encountered when creating titles for the basic hardware of the time, as well as providing a set of basic tools to create the game with, such as code, sprite, and sample editors, music tracker, and tile-mapper. Despite this, they use modern programming languages (commonly Lua) and typically provide features that would have been impossible on the hardware they imitate. Most fantasy consoles also feature the ability to pack your game into a single PNG "disk" that encodes the game directly into the image data via steganography.
It's important to outline that a fantasy console is not analogous to a game engine or framework. As the name implies you are only given control of the virtual hardware to process computations, draw, and generate sound. Adding functionality for anything beyond the standard logic and math functions native to the programming language is entirely up to the user.
So what's the fucking point?
The strength of fantasy consoles is working within a given set of limitations. By having hard limits, it's much less tempting to plan something unachievable and much easier to actually finish a game, freeing you from the curse of the nodev. It also enforces efficient data management, preventing newfags from doing horrifying shit like creating a 200mb pixelshit Super Mario clone in Java (yes, I have seen this exact example). Fantasy consoles can also be a great learning tool for children and fully grown retards who have no idea how to just like make game by providing them with all the tools they need and giving them an environment which will teach them how games actually run rather than obfuscating shit like GameMaker does.