I remember doing all sorts of "clever" arcane things to get a smooth high frame rate for a program on my old IBM PC. Next generation, they have actual graphics cards with overlays, easy vsync, and double-buffering where the buffers can be swapped with a simple toggle instead of trying to find some way to shuffle the bytes faster.

I was able to replace pages of "cleverness" with a few lines of code in the same language.

These guys are very impressed with their improved hammer. It might not be the best tool for the job.