When I read the description of how EGA worked, you can't help feeling that the engineers that created it had planned for exactly the use-case Carmack put it to.

When I read the description of how EGA worked, you can't help feeling that the engineers that created it had planned for exactly the use-case Carmack put it to. In particular, providing for a buffer that was larger than the screen, the ability to move the offset inside the buffer for the screen's origin, and wrapping of the buffer is exactly the feature set that you need to implement scrolling. I don't think it was blind luck that these features were all available on the card. This is often cited as the first example of Carmack's genius when it came to computer graphics, and he certainly deserves credit for being one of the first/astest third-party developers to realise the potential of the EGA card. But if I was one of the engineers that had designed EGA, I would be rather miffed to see how much Carmack is praised for this when it seems relatively clear that he was just using the hardware as it was intended to be used.