I wrote an NES game as my senior project for college. It was a singular experience as the vast majority of my development experience had been web technologies.
I had the advantage of full-featured emulators, breakpoints, examining the code as it was running, and a very searchable community online. I have sometimes pondered on the challenges of writing 6502 assembly without any of these things. Itβs really interesting to see some of what that was.
It certainly is so much easier to get documentation or read forum posts and ask questions today. Back then, we did have fairly decent dev systems though, could do breakpoints and examine code as it was running. It was also cross-development so you could edit and download from your computer onto the dev system attached to the console. To be fair, some people had much more primitive systems, I feel lucky since others could only test by burning EPROMs.
Could you qualify one thing? One that might help is code back then was almost always single threaded and thus easy to reason about. I mean, even today concurrent code is difficult to deal with.
I had the advantage of full-featured emulators, breakpoints, examining the code as it was running, and a very searchable community online. I have sometimes pondered on the challenges of writing 6502 assembly without any of these things. Itβs really interesting to see some of what that was.