Well, for some perspective tricks of the kind being discussed here were frequently published in magazines found in the local grocery store! Getting an extra sp

Well, for some perspective tricks of the kind being discussed here were frequently published in magazines found in the local grocery store! Getting an extra sprite on a horizontal line, or putting more colors on the screen, various math tricks, how to pack multiple flags into a byte, and many other discussions were common. When others say, "we had to", they are in part, communicating how thinking was done. The lower level details were often published down to the bits in registers and doing even simple things took one into tricks land more often than we may realize today. Now that said, the VCS (2600) is a difficult machine. But, it was not above an average programmer to be successful as much as it did demand one go through the careful steps and thinking as told today. In fact, just doing what the machine was designed for; namely, "Combat" required that thinking. I think you may be getting hung up on scope and scale. What I mean is the field was not as broad in some ways, and most everyone was a lot closer to the hardware than we mostly are today too. Kids were jumping onto micros and literally figuring it out with the info they could glean from one another, manuals shipped with the machines (maybe), magazines and the like were the basic communications happening daily. I was one of those kids and in my peer group it was expected to understand the hardware well enough to follow code. So yeah, overall it was just different in ways that may well prove confusing today, depending on what any of us may have chosen as our start point.