How does being invisible protect you from ocean waves? Perhaps they confused "invisibility" with "intangibility". Then again, the Cloaking Device on Star Trek worked via the Deflector Screen (Stargate: Atlantis coppied this) so it's understandable if stupid people get confused.

Or get a Atari 800 HCS (Home Computer System)! Four joystick ports, four sound channels, four Player/Missile Graphics.
(read: four complex and four simple sprites; the simple sprites can be combined into a fifth complex sprite)
And they're still making games for it!

(and it's the only home computer sporting a text mode that actually supports true lower-case text! (as in descenders))

The problem with "Manhatten" is there were times when angels were clearly looking at each other yet they didn't freeze each other. Also; how the hell did that guy torture and injure an angel? They're supposed to be invulnerable when frozen. As in Time doesn't pass for them. Then again, I guess he could've just've looked away or closed his eyes while stabbing it with a sword or spear.
(remember what happened to Prof. Swan when she got too close)

Or the Showtime version of Harrison Bergeron: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron_(film)

There are plenty of games and utilities on Linux that access the VGA chip directly via the "Shared VGA" library.

In fact any program running as the "root" user can access any I/O port and map any memory locations into it's virtual address space.

Actually the Missiles were 1 bit wide just like the Ball. But both the Missiles' and the Ball's single bit could represent 1, 2, 4 or 8 pixels on the VCS's 160 pixel wide screen. And the size could be changed on a per-scan-line basis meaning you could create diamond and ball shaped missiles/balls. Or keep them 1 pixel wide and change the position slightly every scan-line to create a "/" or "\" character.

So Stargate and Fringe aren't Sci-Fi?
(even if Fringe is *BAD* sci-fi sometimes)
Where'd you get the idea that it had to take place in The Future? What about stories that are purely psychological or sociological in nature?

Or maybe you mean that silver doo-dad that Roddy McDowall used in that "The Fantastic Journey" TV series back in the '70s.

The default mode that VGA starts up in is 720x400x16 text mode. This can be extended to 720x480x16 for 80x30 text. Switching to a 8x8 (from 9x16) character cell yields 90x60 text. 256-colour mode automatically makes the pixels twice as wide so photographic pictures are usually viewed in 360x480x256 mode (e.g. Linux's "zgv" viewer).
And, on a monitor with size controls (i.e. not an actual "IBM PS/2 Color Display" monitor), you can get 800x600x16 (thus 400x600x256) if you don't mind a incredibly low refresh rate (below 50Hz).

Not sure about the VIC-20 but the Atari VCS and HCS (Home Computer System) and Apple ][ came out in the 70s. ProLogic's "Flight Simulator" for the Atari HCS is a good example of a game that utilises multiple threads of execution to simulate flying a airplane via polygonal graphics. This is in contrast to most games that have a main thread and a background thread ran by the vertical blank interrupt.
(and perhaps a third ran by the horizontal blank interrupt)

And don't forget Texas Instruments' TI-99/4 (and 99/4A), which also came out in the 70s. And, for that matter, the Intellivision; whose OS would move sprites for you (i.e. the game programme) via a background OS thread.

All these 70s systems had graphics and sounds effects.

Sounds like 4DOS.COM for MS-DOS from the 90's. It was a replacement for the command processor ("COMMAND.COM"). You could type:
SET FILECOMPLETION=CD:DIRS;EDLIN:DIRS TXT DOC CFG;GIFCHECK:DIRS GIF
and typing "CD " and then CONTROL-TAB would give you a list of directories. For EDLIN it would also show text files. For GIFCHECK it would show directories and GIF files.
And when I type CD TOME it knows to swtich to \GAMES\ANGBAND\TOME.
(if I use CDD instead it even changes the currently loggged drive to C:)
If I type CD COMM\*A*.* it would look for a directory (in the directory-tree database) with a "A" anywhere in the filename and any extention whose parent directory is named COMM.

And, if you were using NDOS from Norton Utilities, then you were using 4DOS. Try it out at <URL:ftp://ftp.jpsoft.com/4dos/>.

My 1979 Atari computer (HCS) has "recoverable" RAM disks. But that's because the device drivers/handlers that I use just don't bother to build a new file system (MyDOS) or else they only do so when they can find no existing one (SpartaDOS X). It's the same with the Amiga's "Executive Multitasker" and AmigaDOS as well. I can't imagine how your choice of OS would make any difference as RAM disks are handled by the device handler rather than the the OS itself.
(except for Linux; and even it supports FUSE!)
The same for "RAM:" style file systems. I even remember something like the for MS-DOS.

And the FVWM window manager for X supports pushing a window to the top/bottom of the window stack. I had it set so that the right mouse button on the title bar moved a window to the top of the stack; or, in the case that it was already at the top, to the bottom. I did this because in imitation of the Amiga.
(except it's a special "gadget" instead of the title bar on the Amiga)
Once again that's the job of the window manager and not of the OS.

Why would someone want to build these kinds of things into the OS?

PNG is a still video picture format. Why would anyone want to add animation to it? Just use MNG. That's the "GIF89a" equivilant of PNG. MNG is the "ANIM" to PNG's "ILBM", so to speak.

You mean GIF is ALWAYS lossless. GIF doesn't support lossy compression.

That Lich King ain't so tough anyway. A 13 year-old boy killed him with a sweater!