Interesting article, and it also shows why in the end, for most games we would mainly use Assembly directly.

What many are not aware is that after graduating from bedroom coders, having not much more than what one could acquire thanks to parents support, or small kids jobs, in proper studios cross-compiling with more powerful Assemblers, or indeed K&R C like languages were an improved developer experience.

This post really resonated with me because it highlights the exact challenges I’ve been facing with portability, memory management, and UI adaptation. To streamline development, I’ve recently started using https://www.code-maestro.com/ , and it’s made a noticeable difference. It doesn’t just assist with generating or optimizing code—it also helps document and explain it, which is incredibly useful when juggling legacy logic or trying to restructure older modules without breaking things. I’ve found the ability to explore my own architecture interactively saves a lot of time during debugging or porting. For anyone juggling a multi-platform project in C, it’s worth exploring tools that genuinely help keep things manageable.

Back in the dim dark ages of the 80s, I persuaded one of the system programmers to print out the source for the curses library, which I the diligently typed in to my CPM/80 machine, I then got the source for rogue, which someone else had done a partial port for, using overlays. It was a bit big for the 48k you could reasonably expect a Z80 CPM machine to have. Mostly worked...

I would think that rather than ifdefs, one could use separate port files. And regarding C89/99, a solution here is to use ANSI C, which is what Lua does.

I had always heard that C was ill-suited for 6502 targets because of the way the language uses registers and the stack.

Why not in JS/TS?