Thanks. I agree that the 90s saw the explosion of graphic programming and graphic card techs.
I wonder if a "graphic card emulator" is a legit thing, like a CPU emulator -- or is that simply a 2d/3d/text renderer? The problem I face is, most of the legacy cards are either gone, or expensive to acquire (plus I need to buy a legacy PC), so it is not practical to write drivers for most of the legacy physical cards -- but say if I want to write a driver for a Hercules Graphic Card (admittedly it's a 80s card), can I simply write a software emulation and plug the "driver" into some place? Is it equivalent to writing the low level graphic libraries like SDL?