Closed source though. The author seems to be distributing only compiled binaries.

You're quite right. Tilengine is designed to emulate the inner working of 2D VDPs, so it has all their features. I preffer to say "features" than limitations because it's a very different way of rendering graphics compared to modern GPUs. But obviously this kind of graphics are technically more limited, of course.

It's not a full game engine, only a graphics engine: it doesn't offer sound or any other feature that would be outside of a graphics chip.

It's not an emulator of a particular hardware either: it's based on their working principles but it's a fresh implementation from the ground up.

Regarding SDL, I don't want to tie it to a specific OS or graphics library. It acts as a back-end renderer and it will work on any host environment capable of providing a 32-bit video surface where to draw. In fact the internal windowing system of Tilengine (which is optional and can entirely be bypassed) already uses libSDL for display and user input.

1) I started releasing it as closed source because I don't have knowledge about open source management. I work in the corporate world for many years and I know how to manage private projects. At this moment I fear that if I release it as open source, it will fall in a kind of anarchy and that I will lose control over it. I know this idea is wrong, there are many well driven open source projects that generate revenue, but until I know how does this world work, I prefer to share it as closed.

I hope this aspect is not so bad that people don't want to at least try it to check if it's worth it...

2) The MSVC-only build is for the moment. In my roadmap I've planned builds for at least Linux, Android (NDK native) and Windows Phone. But the platform I know more is MSVC, so it's the first release. In fact I have a working build for GCC that will be the starting point for Linux and Android, but I still have to integrate libpng. This build only loads BMPs (not PNGs) and CSV tilemaps (not zip compressed) as the MSVC build does

I totally agree, that's the worst part of the project.

Of course, they're very powerful engines. But my goal is to provide true retro graphics, with scanline rendering and raster effects in its core. No other engine can do this because all engines (even the 2D-only ones) try to make use of modern GPU acceleration, that has a very different approach for rendering graphics. Choose what you think it fits more your project.

This thing is about a month old since its first public release

2015 - 2005 = 10 years

The site is online again. It had an unexpected peak of traffic when I released the python wrapper and my ISP blocked the website. I upgraded to a paid plan (yes, I was hosting it with a free plan :) ) and no problem