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You could peek and poke as needed. I used to do BIOS interrupts that way.

You could link against native libraries. There were a handful of graphics libraries written in assembly that we used to do fast blitting and resolutions higher than 320x200.

Back in those days, drawing a pixel was just writing to the vga memory buffer, so it was pretty easy.

there were several libs, mostly shareware, that extended the list of supported resolutions with VESA & VGA-modeX ones. I used it a lot of times. Nice days.