> I dazzled quite a bit with side scrollers then, and it took me a long time to uncover the possible ways to use the VGA hardware on the 286 and 386 for scrolli

> I dazzled quite a bit with side scrollers then, and it took me a long time to uncover the possible ways to use the VGA hardware on the 286 and 386 for scrolling -- It was really hard to find information about the VGA hardware registers around 1990/1. By the time I had it nailed, the 486DX was already common and fast enough that everything could be done trivially on the CPU. Thus everything I had struggled to learn about smooth scrolling on the VGA hardware became obsolete. That was how I learned, not to spend too much time trying to optimize (prematurely) for current hardware! I did the same, but with the 486 in 1993! And I wasn't connected at all, no BBS:es, just sharing copies of copies of copies of floppies (etc etc). It's hard to imagine the dearth of information nowadays, and how valuable every scrap of information was. Now and then you'd get across this goldmine of information (in the form of some source code), and spend weeks/months understanding it all. I spent so much time experimenting with Turbo Pascal, inline assembly and VGA mode 13h and mode X. And trying to build the ultimate sprite and tile engine... The good thing about not being connected though: it was easy to stay concentrated on one issue at a time.