In retrospect, it was the limitations that made it so fun. The system was so simple that it was entirely knowable by a single brain, which has become enormously

In retrospect, it was the limitations that made it so fun. The system was so simple that it was entirely knowable by a single brain, which has become enormously more challenging nowadays. I recently ported my teaching raytracer to the Spectrum [0], not even using assembler, but the horribly slow native BASIC. It was a ton of fun! It's super slow especially when run on the original hardware, but even then I can't remember something like this from back in the day (and I'd bet something like Microhobby would have listed this as some kind of curiosity); makes me think the Spectrum's limitations weren't even fully explored. Raytracing people were probably working on beefier machines and more serious projects. [0] https://gabrielgambetta.com/zx-raytracer.html https://gabrielgambetta.com/zx-raytracer.html