Any machine that draws without a framebuffer (NES, C64, Atari 2600) would be pretty complex if you'd have to manually handle these timings.

However, in the NES example you could perhaps embed a NES emulator and hook into its drawing code instead. But that does mean that the emulator itself doesn't introduce any glitches or flaws of its own, of course. At least you'd be able to get some decent timing information from the emulator to properly handle sprite multiplexing and whatnot.