On 5/27/2022 at 7:55 AM, Cyber said:
Ok, I must admit I have a lack of knowledge about this. I'll try to paraphrase myself. I'm trying to talk about home experience. My point is that somebody, who had a C64 back in the 80's was able to code a game (or any other software) in assembly targeted for this same computer. I never had a C64, so I can't know for sure. But I judge from what I read in articles and from what I see in videos today: people could and people did code in assembly on 8 bit micros for this same 8 bit micros at home. They had only this one machine. Their resulting software would be much less advanced than commercial software - I understand this.
Yes, that was how most people worked on a C64. The same computer was both the host and the target. The result was not less advanced than commercial software. On the contrary. I was in the C64 demoscene in the late 80's early 90's, and the demos the scene was outputting at that time was consistently more advanced than 95% of the games out there. The whole point of demos was to push the limit of the machine. Most games on the other hand were on some kind of budget (money and time) and were being developed with many different home computer targets in mind, so they weren't explicitly pushing the limits of the C64.
SlithyMatt's comment about cross development being the norm may have been true for the bigger studios, but there was a lot of indie development going on, e.g. sceners making games and tools, and that was almost always done on a single C64, the machine being both the development host and the target.