And ultimately, that's all you'd ever need in a game, right?

http://playdosgamesonline.com/lotus-the-ultimate-challenge.h...

(runs in the browser)

I like to imagine so! :D

I presume you've seen https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games

Nintendo still has to do that to some extent in order to get competitive performance on outdated hardware. They even managed to get Smash 4 running at 1080p60fps on the Wii U.

Back then it was just called "hardware" ;)