No, but it requires a RAM expansion that was not very affordable in the 80s, costing more than the c64 itself.

Compare to Amstrad CPC Sonic, for a similar 8-bit machine—but only the final and most expensive models.

The hardcore communities today have a few decades extra experience and time to find tricks, that does help with many retro machines.

I have to imagine the development process is a lot better, too. Compile with your 3 GHz processor, launch into it in your emulator… quick feedback loop. (Or maybe this kind of development is still done on the real hardware?)

REU is a bit of a cheat, and for some releases people are using cartridges with far higher capacities than ever sold back in the day. Cross-platform tools and emulation are also huge dev speedups.

But a big thing is that back then, games were often made on a timescale of months, and with a budget. Hobbyist dev has no limits to how much time they want to sink into doing something properly. Ideas & techniques have had many years/decades to percolate into existence.

I believe this requires the RAM expansion unit

which has DMA capability http://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cbm/documents/chipdata/pr...

1) Transfer a block of data from main memory to expansion memory

2) Transfer a block of data from expansion memory to main memory

3) Exchange a block of main memory with a block of expansion

4) Verify a block of main memory with a block of expansion memory

copy is ~1MB/s compared to manual CPU speed of <120KB/s