Retro Game Dev: A Cross-Platform Roguelike Adventure

This post details the journey of creating a roguelike dungeon crawler playable on vintage computers like the Commodore 64 and Commodore PET. The author initially used the TRSE development environment, but shifted to C due to challenges with Pascal, cross-platform compatibility issues, and library limitations. While C offered better portability, significant conditional code was needed to handle varying system architectures, compilers, and standards. Lessons learned include starting small, using conditional compilation judiciously, prioritizing core mechanics, designing flexible resources, leveraging emulators for testing, and understanding hardware quirks. The author ultimately decided to focus on the Commodore 64 first before expanding to other platforms.