Comment Re:Cheating (Score 1) 255
I've often thought the same. However...
Even those "old skool" 80s and 90s demos had their own "graphics libraries", just on lower level - BIOS routines to switch graphics modes, and if there was music, it was usually done using MIDI or GUS, which had hardware mixing routines. Add all DOS interrupts on top of that and you had plenty of "libraries" also available back then.
So while there is difference (back then you had to do your own polygon filling routines), even old-timers had some help, and you could even argue that it was quite an equal amount when compared to yesterday's standards (flat shaded polygons were great back then).
Heck, I'd even go as far as to say, that 4kb, even with DirectX and whatnot, is even more amazing when you consider that even basic OS install requires 20 GB disk space. In the 90s, the days of Commodore 64 were pretty close, and 4kb was just few orders of magnitude smaller than "the usual stuff" those days.