btw, smiled when I saw the domain of their site.

Back in high school I used to spend way too much time playing with mode 13h. I used turbo pascal which allowed some inline assembly syntax [1], so one would initialize the 320x200x256color mode like:

    BEGIN
      asm
        mov     ax, 13h
        int     10h
      end;
    END;

and put a pixel on the screen like:

    Procedure Putpixel (X, Y : Integer; Col : Byte);
      BEGIN
        VgaMem [X + (Y * 320)] := Col;
      END;

The palette was just 256 colors but you could pick which rgb colors to use [2], some effects would be based in palette cycling, others (fire!) would like nice by focusing in fewer hues.

Such a time sink... :-)

1: http://archive.gamedev.net/archive/reference/articles/articl...

2: http://www.brackeen.com/vga/bitmaps.html