One of the most impressive games I ever saw was Pinball Fantasies for DOS. Running at 60fps on a 286 with real music through the built in PC speaker was unheard of, like a real games console.
The way that works is that on VGA you can resize the video buffer to e.g. be 320x400 displayed on a 320x200 display (i.e. it still only shows 200 out of those 400 lines). You then use hardware panning to change to start offset which indicates which line in the buffer the VGA starts scanning to screen (in 320x200 mode it will only scan 200 lines of that buffer). With this technique, super smooth scolling can be achieved since a hardware effect like that has no strain on the CPU or bus whatsoever. A pinball game only has to update relativly small areas when it comes to actual pixel changes, the ball, some lights, etc, so its relatively straight forward for a game like that to achive 60fps :)