I didn't go quite that far, but I did some insane stuff using the built-in i/o port access and the parallel printer port.
I also learned to properly program using Turbo Pascal. You might enjoy Go. I find its small language, library, and tools that I can keep in my head leave me feeling similar to how I felt using Turbo Pascal back in the day.
Or perhaps Nim: http://howistart.org/posts/nim/1 (That article btw, is itself an example of beautiful software. So short and sweet, and still manage to cover a pretty deep rabbit hole of computer science and plain fun, with it's mandelbrot-in-brainfuck-in-nim)
Remember punching in 4 pages of Pascal from a PC Magazine in early 90s. I had no idea about anything, syntax, semantics... it was long and painful.