When the Mario Brothers Game was released for the '80s Nintendo (NES), it was thought the hardware on most PC home computers could never compete with the smooth side scrolling of the game system because the graphics processor was so advanced.
However, The ID software team that later made Duke Nukem found a way around the hardware limitations. They used a technique called double buffering, they were aware that the VGA graphics controller keeps two copies of the screen so they programmed the game to draw the graphics changes of the hidden copy of the screen then switch the panes around when the rendering is complete at the end of each frame cycle. They also programmed the game to only render the parts of the screen that had changed, like a brick was that was half way off the screen.
When commander keen was released, people were amazed that is was still smooth scrolling as well as the mario brothers despite running on much slower graphically challenged dos based PC computers.
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