I remember implementing a side scrolling platformer on my 386 and being boggled by how slow everything was compared to on consoles. Didn’t know what hardware acceleration was then, and this was before I got Internet access so I worked it out myself, coded it in C, then hand optimized the inner drawing loop in assembly, rewriting the pixel writes to use rep/mov instructions for each tile. This took a while but I managed to squeeze out acceptable performance for my game with Keen-like smooth scrolling.

Reading Masters of Doom some 30 years later was pretty eye opening. This article too - to this day I’ve never heard of latch writes.

So much voodoo in graphics programming!!