Right now it's not easy to search for (and tell the difference between) games that will run on real console hardware versus ones which are just 8/16-bit console styled or inspired.

For example, many of the games tagged "gameboy" or "nes" are only built for and run on Windows/Web/etc.
https://itch.io/games/tag-gameboy
https://itch.io/games/tag-nes

So if you're trying to find games to run on a real NES or Game Boy it's labor intensive to look through each entry in the results to find out if it's meant for real hardware.

If there was a "Console" option for the platform list (Win/Mac/Linux/Android/iOS/Web) that could make it easier to filter out unwanted results (for both wanting or not wanting console-hardware games).

(I opened an issue for this on Github last year, but it hasn't had any action so I thought I'd open it here too. https://github.com/itchio/itch.io/issues/1021 )

Ideally, I would love to have an option when assigning a platform, to select “custom”, and have an extra field where we can type a “not supported” platform. Even better if it can auto-complete based on other popular custom platforms.

I’m sure it’s not as easy to implement, and might require a lot of work, but would make Itch a much much more awesome place to browse game at.

Indeed, at least one competing marketplace has "ROM" as an option, which lumps all of them together but at least tells you the game is intended for some sort of emulator.

Since the tagging system here could be combined with the "Console" / "ROM" option for filtering, it could make finding what you want work pretty well (and avoid that lumping together).

I’m not a fan of how there’s only 4 fixed platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux and Android). In my opinion, those should become tags as well, which would allow people to add any platform tags.