Some of you may be interested in this: http://www.geekzine.net/freya/index.php

"Freya is many things. First and Foremost Freya is an embeddable game programming environment. What does this mean? This means that Freya's sole purpose is to make it easier for people to add in game programming capabilities into a scripting language with little or no effort. Freya 2.0 Supports: These graphic formats: .pcx, .bmp, .tiff, .tga These Audio formats: .wav, .mod, .it, .xm, .sm, .mid, .ogg Translucency, scaling and rotation Pixel Perfect Collision detection Animated sprites + depth sorting A 2d Map system with a Map editor Snes Mode 7 style effect Mosaic effect Blur effect 16bpp graphics allowing for an unlimited array of colours Page buffering, timer routines (for keeping it running the same on all computers) Fast Pixel Primitives TTF Font support An in game coding console Portable Speed. Up 5x faster than other Script Game Libraries/Engines XML reading script auto-running and much more..."

It only runs in 320x240x16bpp mode, but if you wanted to quickly make something 'retro', this might be a nice tool.

Would be a lot more interesting if could run at higher resolutions and 32 bpp colour depth...
Other than that it looks really nice, especially for rapid prototyping of 2d game ideas (maybe even full games - I don't know about its general speed).