[iainmerrick]

You’re right, of course! It’s amazing to think how many 8-bit and 16-bit games got ported to a whole bunch of different computers.

I was thinking mainly of the 90s and early 2000s, I guess, and for desktop apps where the main platform of interest was Windows, followed by a long tail of Mac, X-Windows, BeOS, etc... All those platforms could “easily” (i.e. with effort, but no rocket science required) be handled by a single C/C++ codebase with platform-specific #ifdefs.

I think the equivalent for today’s platforms would have to be Javascript. Unlike the C/C++ approach, you lose direct access to platform features.