> On the NES however, every line of code is yours. There's no such thing as libraries, operating systems, or frameworks. They don't exist. It's refreshing.
I would say that there’s still “other people’s code” that you rely on—that code is just reified into ASICs you drive with control messages over IO ports, rather than being OS system-service daemons you drive with control messages over IPC.
Also keep in mind that, despite the lack of a forced OS or BIOS on the system itself, Nintendo’s SDKs included snippets or code samples (or sometimes complete small libraries as modifiable assembler source), and developers shared others around when they came up with them to solve a particular problem.
(Later on, in SNES/N64/GameCube era, Nintendo effectively handed you a whole library exokernel worth of precompiled, static-linkable libraries for you to use, too. The NES was too small for that, though.)
I would say that there’s still “other people’s code” that you rely on—that code is just reified into ASICs you drive with control messages over IO ports, rather than being OS system-service daemons you drive with control messages over IPC.
Also keep in mind that, despite the lack of a forced OS or BIOS on the system itself, Nintendo’s SDKs included snippets or code samples (or sometimes complete small libraries as modifiable assembler source), and developers shared others around when they came up with them to solve a particular problem.
(Later on, in SNES/N64/GameCube era, Nintendo effectively handed you a whole library exokernel worth of precompiled, static-linkable libraries for you to use, too. The NES was too small for that, though.)