The 2600 was such an interesting machine for its lack of video RAM. Developers "raced the beam" to draw things just in time for them to be displayed, changing colors and sprites partway through a line to make all the cool (for the time) effects.
Funny, my smallish ARM Cortex-M / VGA DIY video console also works like that, with less RAM than needed for a framebuffer. There are framebuffer modes, but with less pixels/bpp than natively output by the video signal output.