Thank you! The thing about eventually building your own meta language ends up happening all the time with bigger assembly projects. I do have a fair few quality-of-life macros too, but probably fewer than I should. I did end up needing to implement by hand what would be standard functions, things like atoi, itoa, strlen, memcpy, streqn.

Higher level languages are more convenient for 99% of things, but the directness of Assembly gives me a rush unlike any other. I didn't live through the C64/Amiga, but I was obsessed with old C64/ZX emulators growing up.

I don't know. Certainly the PC had a lot of options, but it wasn't impossible. My first piece of commercial software was written entirely in x86 assembler and had to navigate things like graphics card options and multiple sound card options. It could be done, it was just a lot more of a PITA.

Once I was doing 3D I quickly started moving everything but the inner loops to Turbo C, because I'm not a total masochist :)