What about 2D graphics? Sprites? Old school stuff? I keep meaning to fire up DOSBox-X and go through some old tutorials. I really just want to put pixels on the screen and work my way up from there - everything else just seems to get in the way.
I know some would say it's a bad language, but back in the day it was incredibly accessible and spawned a lot of shared code and tutorials. If you focus on the techniques and algorithms, treat the language as pseudocode rather than "the right way to do things", you can have a lot of fun and learn quickly things you can translate to whatever your language of choice is.
That really isn't how modern, accelerated graphics works - even 2D accelerated graphics! "Sprites" are slightly closer to the mark, but it goes far beyond that.
All that happens on the fly without intermediary frame buffer composition in between. The output goes directly to the display (over HDMI, eDP/displayport, DVI, etc.).
Yeah, and of course mouse cursor is a sprite in the traditional sense. Although on modern HW you could implement mouse cursor as a hardware layer.
C64, Amiga, MSX, NES, SNES, Sega Master System, etc. all supported hardware layer sprites back in the eighties.