Early on there just weren't cross compilers and "real computers", at least not in the British "back bedroom" games scene. I didn't write on the Spectrum, but ce

Early on there just weren't cross compilers and "real computers", at least not in the British "back bedroom" games scene. I didn't write on the Spectrum, but certainly on the Dragon and the C64 it was a case of write, save, execute, reset, load, write some more. It was this sort of tedium which provoked at least one of my more able chums to write out his assembly in longhand and then produce pages of handwritten hex to type in instead. After I made a bit of money I upgraded to two C64s and two floppy disk drives, so I could write on one and test on the other. That would have been about 1985. And then a while after that a miraculous invention called "PDS" came along, which involved a hardware connection from a PC to the target system, and simplified everything greatly. You wrote code on the PC and just squirted it into the target's brain. Oh how I wanted to use that, but by then I was out of programming... The Oliver Twins have written reams of background about the early days that touches on this: http://www.olivertwins.com/history http://www.olivertwins.com/history