I put a lot of it on the availability of information and documentation now. And modern operating systems and libraries are better than having to directly poke a

I put a lot of it on the availability of information and documentation now. And modern operating systems and libraries are better than having to directly poke at obscure low level hardware like you had to do back then (I mean, not to detract from this persons excellent work, especially all the low level reverse engineering, but using SDL + OpenGL is a lot easier than poking at hardware registers in weird graphics modes and crazy sensitive VGA timing).