> The final products of those amazing programs that show up late in the platform's lifetime are indeed running on the same hardware, but aren't those programs often developed using faster computers of later periods?
They are developed on faster computers but that was already the case at the heyday of these games, so the difference might be less than you would expect.
What is a huge difference though is access to information. Back in the day I got my weekly homeopathic dose of assembly language from a local home computer magazine. That's all there was. Today every ever so obscure detail is just few searches away. I cannot stress enough what difference this makes in learning and development speed.
They are developed on faster computers but that was already the case at the heyday of these games, so the difference might be less than you would expect.
What is a huge difference though is access to information. Back in the day I got my weekly homeopathic dose of assembly language from a local home computer magazine. That's all there was. Today every ever so obscure detail is just few searches away. I cannot stress enough what difference this makes in learning and development speed.