I think it's unfair to say that it's "without any hardware acceleration". These tricks work because the VIC-II can unburden the CPU a lot by letting it work wit

I think it's unfair to say that it's "without any hardware acceleration". These tricks work because the VIC-II can unburden the CPU a lot by letting it work with character cells and character definitions instead of individual pixels, and in Parallax, all the CPU needs to do to create the parallax effect is to redefine the 32 bytes that define the background characters. I didn't know that Flimbo's Quest trick, that's cool!