Why not? I think it's just an interesting side project fo the dev. This is a port of the original version for modern home computers, so it's not like they're limiting their audience.

But I would suggest that while it should be possible to make a good adaptation for 3rd generation systems (NES etc.), you're not going to be able to make a substantially similar product until you reach at least the 5th generation (PlayStation etc.), and perhaps not even then. The blurry parallax backgrounds, high number of particles, and level of detail make it necessary.

Yes, they've changed the Pitfall image. Originally they were using the first image from CrayonRosary's post.

Having tried both a USB3 drive adapter and downloading over Ethernet, I'll say that Ethernet was way slower for me.

The average copy time on the adapter was about 30 minutes, but over Ethernet it took 3-4 times as long.

Oh my goodness, replacing the optical drive with a modern solution isn't close to halfway to complete software emulation. It's not even 20% of the way there.

it shouldn't matter that much what language the keywords are in

Another problem is that the grammars of many well-supported programming languages also mirror English/Romance language grammars. Unfortunately, dealing with that is more than just a matter of swapping out keywords.

EDIT: I may have been unclear; I wasn't trying to imply that this problem is greater than or even equal to the lack of documentation, tutorials, libraries, etc. Just that it's another issue, aside from the individual words themselves, which is often overlooked by monolingual people.

I kind of agree with you but there's also the issue that when you have a problem with Windows, there are 30 people to tell you, "Here are the hoops, and here's how to jump through them," while on Linux there are often only 3-5 people, all telling you, "LOL wipe and replace your whole OS with the distro that I use because I don't have that specific problem."