NES and SNES were not your general "development system of the 80s"; I'm quite sure GP was referring to the Apple, Oric, Acorn, BBC, Dragon, MSX, Tandy CoCo, Spe

NES and SNES were not your general "development system of the 80s"; I'm quite sure GP was referring to the Apple, Oric, Acorn, BBC, Dragon, MSX, Tandy CoCo, Spectrum, Amiga and even PCg/PCjr/XT of the time. Commodore's C64, PET and VIC20 were exceptional in how hard they made using graphics at the time from the included BASIC; But in general it was quite easy. The Atari VCS2600 had an even weirder video setup: It had one line of video memory (a 1D canvas!), and it was up to the program to replace the contents of that line while the screen raster was flying back to the next line. And a few sprites to sweeten the deal.