You're right, decades of experience are also very important (though there are youngsters starting on platforms like the NES or TI graphing calculators doing coo

You're right, decades of experience are also very important (though there are youngsters starting on platforms like the NES or TI graphing calculators doing cool stuff as well). I'm not sure I agree about toolchains, though. The 6502 is not a very good target for C compilation, pretty much any assembly programmer can code circles around what cc65 produces. So, no offense to you or anyone else that writes C for 8-bit machines, but I don't think any of the new games and programs that really "push the limits" of these machines are written in C. So that leaves modern cross assemblers, which are indeed much more capable than common target/native assemblers of the olden days, but don't exactly afford a quantum leap of productivity either. Then again, modern emulators are a godsend for debugging.