You can still do that, even more so on systems with memory protection as you will not break OS's interrupt handlers by doing that. Notably pixomatic (Rad Game

You can still do that, even more so on systems with memory protection as you will not break OS's interrupt handlers by doing that. Notably pixomatic (Rad Game Tools' SW rasterizer) compiles Direcd3D shaders into i386 code which uses ESP as general purpose register.