Why would those homebrew game developers be unable to do what programmers did back then? It is not even as if games back then had huge teams like they do today.
No reason really, and the video doesn’t suggest they’d be unable to. Its title is doing that regular clickbaity style of YouTube, but the content itself is interesting if you wondered what went into making these small games, and how some grew in size later in the NES’ existence as more was added to cartridges to enable more involved games.
Certainly not unable, but lots of factors seem like they would add to difficulty particularly if emulators didn't exist (because cartridge-based storage, aging/costly hardware). Then there's the idea of having a target on your back (or any tools that make it more viable) due to extremely litigious/malicious entities and to me it just seems like a niche that isn't worth the extra time.
I'm grateful for PC games under 100MiB. Closer to 10MiB is worthy of praise and below that may be half amazing. There is .kkrieger at only 95KiB for a 3D game (and that is another mealtime topic), but I think that is more interesting visually than it is for gameplay.
Or to be clear, I see the "STILL" more for creating games for old proprietary hardware than for optimization itself.
Correct. The last line of my comment is most relevant to this chain.
More specifically I could say that while many optimizations might be general-use or discoverable, others may be specific to said old system (or maybe getting around limitations). That and this level of optimization would be diminishing returns for even the lowest of modern systems (but obviously nearly required for the target hardware).
Making a minimalist and well-optimized game for desktop PC is going to be significantly easier and with more of an audience than trying to target most other hardware. There are also fantasy consoles like TIC-80 or WASM-4 for more modern/open targets that likely have better documentation/communities (or the community for whatever language you are using instead).
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