Back then, it didn't even help much to have the original assets. I worked in-house for a company porting some of their early EGA graphics PC games to the C64, a

Back then, it didn't even help much to have the original assets. I worked in-house for a company porting some of their early EGA graphics PC games to the C64, and I just had to basically do everything from scratch. I could look at the original source code and art assets, but I was writing 6502 C64 assembly and the original was MSDOS 8088, with absolutely no commonality. Even the art-- I had to be my own artist-- was a tremendous chore. Downgrading 16px16px8 color EGA "tiles" to C64 8x16x4 color sprites when the 8 pixels were double width and one of the 4 colors was "transparent" was frequently an exercise in frustration. At one point I hollered at my boss that "I can't make a duck out of this!" (attempting to create a mallard flapping its wings) and went home early. I came back the next say and made a duck, but only barely. I eventually quit to work on my engineering degree. Never regretted it for a moment. A lot of us got really burned out back then.