In a roundabout way BASIC on those machines is like modern high-level languages.
Slow and inefficient for sure, but most of the magic is happening directly at the hardware level (sprites, memory-mapped IO, etc.), so there's a surprisingly large amount of stuff you can do with very acceptable performance.
Slow and inefficient for sure, but most of the magic is happening directly at the hardware level (sprites, memory-mapped IO, etc.), so there's a surprisingly large amount of stuff you can do with very acceptable performance.