AK Dewdney also wrote one of my favorite books, The Planiverse. I also bought a couple of his books that compile some of his SA articles; they look like fun diversions, and they'd probably be easier to program on an 8-bit micro than on some feature-heavy windowed environment.
Interesting point about 8-bit micros vs. today's machines. I think they're easier, but only up to a point...sometimes, especially for some of the computationally heavy stuff, the speed and memory capacity of today's machines would be a GODSEND relative to an old 8-bit, letting you trivially do things (like, say, keep a monster honkin' 2D cellular automata array in memory) that you'd have to jump through hoops for on say a C=64.
I think the trick is finding the right language... I don't know if there's a good realtime graphics library for Perl, but processing.org has something for Java that looks cool, plus there are a few BASIC variations for Windows around (old standbys like Visual Basic and even QuickBasic, some other things like DarkBasic oriented at writing 3D games...)