Experience with 8-bit micros also makes me curse the barriers you often find on modern machines that prevent you from really controlling the video display. Whether it's well-meaning display drivers refusing your custom resolutions to avoid "blowing up" the monitor, problems with bad or partially implemented drivers (in the open-source case, probably due to the video card manufacturer having a proprietary hold on the necessary information), or going through graphics APIs which are only specified to suggest what the hardware should do rather than command it - for example, if you want to avoid tearing you may ask (in some very platform/API/situation-specific way) for vsync, but whether you'll get it is another matter. Yeah whenever I see a monstrously powerful modern system seemingly wheezing and straining to push a few pixels smoothly from one end of the screen to the other it makes me sad.
