The pungent smell of Myrrh incense revived a memory of a friend's boat we visited several times, 40 years ago.  It had a pungent lived in, myrrh smell.  This memory is all but gone, except the smell.  The lion of the time thought this was what an old boat that's been lived in always smells like.

The lion kingdom continued pondering what attracts animals to programming games for vintage computers.  It could be the challenge of getting the most out of the least transistors.  It could be the low level programming model being more flexible.  It's definitely not easier to get good results from a C64 than it is from godot, as hard as godot is.  

The mane attraction lions believe is a much higher chance of a game for a vintage computer getting played.  If petscii robots & planet X3 were written for android, it would have been just another android programming channel no-one watched.  They would have been just more android programming examples no-one played.  It has nothing to do with the programming model.  It's because the C64 was a very popular computer that not a lot of software is still written for.

Watching an animal trying to draw bitmap circles in C64 BASIC reminded lions of why they never gravitated to programming an 8Mhz 8086.  We never had the programming tools for the 8086 that we had for the 6510.  There was no assembler or programming examples like Compute magazine & Hesmon.  We just had gwbasic for the 8086.  It was much slower at drawing than assembly language on the C64.  It had canned drawing routines, but these were not very optimized.  Part of the problem was the 640x400 resolution having a lot more pixels to draw.

Reviewing the old green manual, it really was intended for entering small assembly language programs.  

Lions remember it overprinting the line & prompting for the next line.  Then the disassembly command was often used for editing programs in memory.  It disassembled in realtime by cursoring up & down, but sometimes it became misaligned.

Unknown to young lions, it had commands to convert between hex & decimal.  There was a "new locator" command for relocating code with absolute addresses.  There was an "output divert" command which could save a disassembled program to disk in a format that could be edited in a text editor.  The trick is there wasn't an "input divert" command which loaded keyboard input from disk.  That would have allowed it to be used as an assembler.  That would have competed with their separate assembler product.

It has a command to exit to BASIC, but there's no way to enter a Hesmon command from BASIC.  There were keyboard phantom programs which poked keypresses into the keyboard buffer, but hesmon had total control when it was running.  Nothing could be running in an interrupt service routine when hesmon was running.

It would have been unthinkable at the time, but the only way to program a C64 today is to build a disk image with cross tools & just load the disk image.  It boggles the mind why so many C64 programmers still use period tools.