"Another World", the game, is an interesting example of this approach. It's implemented in a mini-VM, with 29 opcodes - apart from the low-level "mov", "call",

"Another World", the game, is an interesting example of this approach. It's implemented in a mini-VM, with 29 opcodes - apart from the low-level "mov", "call", "ret", etc. there are high-level ones too, like "fill fb" or "draw txt". The VM design was closely related to the art style of the game, based on polygons, not bitmaps. With this approach it was fairly easy to port the game to various platforms. "Only" the VM implementation had to be ported, while the bytecode remains the same. Of course, the VM implementation had to be tied to the graphics and sound subsystems of the target platform. There's a super-interesting series of blog posts, starting with [1], describing the "Another World" internals and also the design of all the platforms to which it was ported: Amiga, Atari ST, PC, Genesis, SNES and GBA. [1] https://fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons/index.html https://fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons/index.html