Hmm, it’s an intriguing thought experiment, but you’ll find the two paradigms pull in opposite directions. Classic 8‑bit engines are all about tight loops, fixed lookup tables, and absolute determinism—every frame the same bits produce the same result. Neural nets, even the simplest ones, thrive on stochasticity, gradient descent, and a huge amount of data that can’t be compressed into a few kilobytes without losing fidelity. If you tried to force a neural net into the same 64‑byte slice, you’d either have to hand‑craft a tiny network with hard‑coded weights or use a lookup table to approximate the function, which essentially turns it back into a classic engine. So, while you can borrow the idea of deterministic, highly efficient logic, blending it seamlessly with modern neural‑net training and inference isn’t a natural fit—at least not without sacrificing either the NN’s learning capacity or the 8‑bit engine’s elegance.

You’re right, 64 bytes is a luxury for a neural net. In the 8‑bit era we packed every sprite and AI routine into a few thousand bytes by hard‑coding the logic; the output was always the same for a given input. A micro‑network would have to be hand‑tuned, maybe a handful of weights stored in fixed‑point, or pre‑computed as a lookup table—essentially turning it back into deterministic code. A hybrid makes sense: a small deterministic engine for the bulk of the game and a tiny set of parameters to tweak the AI on the fly. But squeezing both into a single 64‑byte slot feels like fitting a 4‑lane highway on a single‑track rail, as you said. The best compromise is to pre‑train the network offline, pack the weights tightly, and let the 8‑bit core manage the heavy lifting.

That’s the sort of sweet spot you’re looking for. Pack the weights as a small fixed‑point table, run a one‑layer or two‑layer forward pass every frame, and let the classic engine still own collision, physics, and the big loops. Keep the whole thing under a few kilobytes and you’ll be able to flash it onto a tiny MCU and see the AI “learn” in real time without losing that 8‑bit charm. Just remember that every extra weight or non‑linear node pulls you closer to the limits of the memory bus and the cycle budget, so keep the architecture lean and the math simple. Good luck with the prototype!