What is the best console to start programing on. As far as good learning experience, beginner level, least cost. Im just curious because I may want to do some console stuff after I get farther with DirectX and OpenGL. I suppose DirectX is pretty worthless with any console...except maybe Xbox?

I''m not an expert on the subject, but I think(could be wrong) that each console has their own graphics library. I think XBOX uses DirectX, but I''m not sure. I would say some of the easiest consoles to start programming on are probably GBA(that is what I am doing) and Dreamcast(experimented, but got no further than that). Hope this helps. Also, these two are very cheap.

GP32 handheld console is even easier to program than GBA! It''s very close to DOS game programming. If you want to learn more about GP32, the best site is GP32news.com