@sos One more thing worth stressing out - most of what you were talking about applies well also to many other kinds of games than software rendered ones! Rolling your own tech is also perfectly viable for many high-res 2D games. Writing a simple GPU accelerated renderer for those is something a single dev can easily handle, but there's also plenty of ready made portable stuff to pick and match :) Allegro's OpenGL renderer alone handles a dozen different platforms in my projects.