I would also add internationalization. There were multi-language games back in the day, but the overhead of producing different versions for different markets was extremely high. Unicode has .. not quite trivialized this, but certainly made a lot of things possible that weren't.

Much respect to people who've manage to retrofit it: there are guerilla translated versions of some Japanese-only games.

> this is all before you take into account that modern graphics and audio is bitmap / PCM and running at resolutions literally orders of magnitude greater

Yes, people underestimate how much this contributes, especially to runtime memory usage.

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teamonkey 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The framebuffer size for a single 320x200 image with 16 colours is 32k, so nearly the same amount of memory as this entire game.

320x200 being an area of screen not much larger than a postage stamp on my 4k monitor.

The technical leap from 40 years ago never fails to astound me.

	▲	pjc50 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The 48k Spectrum had a 1-bit "framebuffer" with colours allocated to 8x8 character tiles. Most consoles of the time were entirely tile/sprite based, so you never had a framebuffer in RAM at all. I think it's a valid view that (a) we have way more resources and (b) sometimes they are badly used in ways that results in systems being perceptibly slower than the C64 sometimes, when measured in raw latency between user input and interaction response. Usually because of some crippling system bottleneck that everything is forced through.