> Since modern computers have 10000x more memory to clean up, The thing I don't understand is that the application presumably isn't using any more or less memo

> Since modern computers have 10000x more memory to clean up, The thing I don't understand is that the application presumably isn't using any more or less memory than it did when it ran on a 1/10,000x computer. You're not scanning the whole RAM for memory to clean up, just the allocated memory. And on a game that was designed to use 128kB, that's presumably not very much.