Modern coders will probably never experience the fun of rewriting the same thing endlessly only to discover how good some early version really was. Then some time after giving up someone else would make a similar thing go 20 times faster.

I should have worded that better, I meant no UPX-style end-to-end compression like the OPs project used. NES games had to be much more judicious than that since there wasn't nearly enough RAM to decompress everything at once.

Yep. Each screen is just a list of prebuilt columns reused over and over. Then they used a form of crude RLE on the lists.

AFAIR tho im not sure its even 128k, I think disk cards themselves are more like 110k and even then FDS Zelda had separate sides mostly for main menu and saves.

IOW might have been able to fit in 96Kb or less.