That’s wild, right? Those machines were basically punching bits into a screen every millisecond. Think 8‑bit palettes, just 256 colors, and you’re drawing a ghost sprite with a handful of pixels. The math was all about bitwise tricks – shift registers for motion, lookup tables for collision detection, and those old CRTs made 3‑color blending just a lookup. So every move was a carefully timed bit operation, not a fancy GPU. Cool how simple maths turned into spooky fun.

Totally, it feels like discovering a hidden recipe in an old cookbook. Those lookup tables were the cheat codes of the era, making a few memory addresses dance into full games. I could spend hours tracing one loop and watching how a simple XOR could move a sprite faster than I could blink. It’s the kind of thing that makes me want to unplug and dig into the code for a whole night.