The good old Commodore did not have nearly enough memory to store all these beautiful images as screen sized bitmaps. Most of the games used text mode with a custom character set.

I always wondered how this worked on the Amiga and PC ports of the classic games. Did they just copy the approach and use text mode as well or did they use proper bitmap images as backgrounds? Same question for games that were native to the 16/32 bit platforms. Did they throw bitmaps around like memory was cheap or did they ever use the text mode trick as well?