Yeah, too bad the graphics modes of C64 were "text modes" of a couple different character sizes and a redefinable 8-bit charset. Colors were from a fixed, but c

Yeah, too bad the graphics modes of C64 were "text modes" of a couple different character sizes and a redefinable 8-bit charset. Colors were from a fixed, but carefully designed 16-color palette on the VIC-II chip itself. Due to the character graphics limitation, the colors couldn't be placed anywhere, but more like in a foreground/background color style selection within the character grid, although some lower res mode allowed four colors within the same "character" space. Additionally, there was an overlay layer of a few one-colored-each sprites (non-color bits were transparency). Sprites were limited in size but not in placement and were as close to straight-forward pixel-based single-color graphics you'd get on a C64. Video RAM was expensive back then, so the common "gaming" hardware worked around the issues in ways that made use of graphics as independently colored pixels very difficult, and this includes things like the game consoles, Amigas and Atari STs and their lack of chunky graphics modes. A Macintosh II with a full-color display card and an RGB display from 1987 could be one of the oldest commodity hardware setups that could do what you ask for; simple fully buffered frame buffer supporting 24bit RGB colors. VRAM-wise they were 32bit really, but 8 bits per pixel were wasted, because RGBA wasn't supported and it wasn't until early 90s Apple supported 16bit modes; 1/2/4/8/24bit graphics were your only options on Macs until then. They had accelerated 2D drawing primitives from the OS / graphics card firmware-driver (Color QuickDraw) supporting with APIs doing what you describe and in a way where your software wasn't dependent on the hardware implementation; software written for them would work until 2006 and the Intel Macs, and discontinuation of the Classic environment in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on the PPC Macs. Some nonstandard "extended" VGA cards before VESA standardization of "SVGA modes" could also do it by late 80s/early 90s, but those were pretty much hardware-dependent and you had to use them at bare metal until OS / driver support for such came around in Windows 3 times. Some MS-DOS software, like Deluxe Paint would support many of them though.