On the other hand, the C64 had standard hardware without a need for abstraction layers, and the hardware was trivial to use from assembly - just put numbers into various memory addresses. Plus the HW natively supported things like sprites and sound synthesis.
I guess one of the most difficult platforms for demo programming (in terms of having to write things from scratch) was PC in the DOS/Win16 era. You could get into 320x200x8bit graphics mode quite easily (the so called Mode 13h) but beyond that you were on your own.
Yeah, that's true. Still remember the hardware register on the Atari ST $ff8240.
Best think about standard hardware was that, if somebody wrote something faster/better than you did then their code was demonstrably better - you couldn't blame it on drivers or anything else.
I had this situation with somebody called Darek Mihocka who wrote an accelerated text function for the ST. I beat his code, he then came up with something nearly twice as fast as mine! I went crazy wondering how he did it until the 'move.p' instruction came to me, I shit you not, whilst I was asleep.
Good times, and a great way to learn how to code and more importantly what really happens on the machine underlying it.
I guess one of the most difficult platforms for demo programming (in terms of having to write things from scratch) was PC in the DOS/Win16 era. You could get into 320x200x8bit graphics mode quite easily (the so called Mode 13h) but beyond that you were on your own.