alphaman-src VS interword-c64

> I’m not old enough to know how much that affected full computers

I recently helped someone open source a roguelike they wrote in the 90s - https://github.com/superjamie/alphaman-src

The source is terse as you describe, some parts are written in assembly, and strings are actually one big string with functions that extract substrings. There isn't a clear PRINT statement in the whole program.

All of this because he wanted the source to fit on one floppy.

I realise this is the hard way, but my long-term intention is to reimplement Alphaman from the original source, so I figured start with the existing software interfaces.

Did a my first paid software development pretty much exactly 30 years ago, specifically I was hired to port a word processor from the Amiga to the Commodore 64. So my experience is mostly related to the word of 8-bit home computers, already a dying world by then, and I wouldn't be able to tell how working in an office was like as a was still in school at the time and it was a side project.

The source code is here, by the way: https://github.com/mvindahl/interword-c64

Still, a few general observations about that particular corner and that particular time of software development: