In a way it harkens back to 80s 8-bit home micros. BASIC on these boxes is incredibly slow, but you can still easily do realtime sprite-based games because all

In a way it harkens back to 80s 8-bit home micros. BASIC on these boxes is incredibly slow, but you can still easily do realtime sprite-based games because all it is doing is manipulating some magic memory locations that are mapped to dedicated video-drawing hardware. Instead of the software needing to blit every frame, all it needs to do is say "Sprite 3 moved left by 3 pixels" every frame. Instead of doing collision detection in software, you just read a magic memory location that tells you which sprites have collided since you last looked. If you're writing the kind of game that is possible to do in C64 Basic, you don't actually gain much by writing it in assembler instead. What you get from writing in assembler is an expansion of the universe of possible games.