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by joezydeco 760 days ago
Most of the classic games from this era were written in 6502 assembly language. There were a number of popular macro assemblers available, C compilers were a bit more exotic. Given that the entire executable fit in 48K, there was no runtime library here.

There's an urban legend that Nasir Gebelli wrote his most popular games with the tiny mini-assembler in the Apple ][ ROM, opcode by opcode.

2 comments

Not an urban legend, he confirmed it in an interview with John Romero (great interview BTW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3EmtTpoEa8 )
Some notable exceptions I'm aware of...

Ultima I was written in Applesoft BASIC with portions in assembly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_I:_The_First_Age_of_Dar...

Wizardry was written in Apple Pascal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizardry#Development

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Pascal