In a roundabout way BASIC on those machines is like modern high-level languages. Slow and inefficient for sure, but most of the magic is happening directly at

In a roundabout way BASIC on those machines is like modern high-level languages. Slow and inefficient for sure, but most of the magic is happening directly at the hardware level (sprites, memory-mapped IO, etc.), so there's a surprisingly large amount of stuff you can do with very acceptable performance.