I remember writing my own smooth scrolling file viewer on DOS. You could use the character registers for the display controller (think it was VGA, 80x25 mode).
Not novel, but fun way to get more resolution than you have but for narrow use cases.
Not novel but it was esoteric. I remember a friend showing off his own custom communications software with smooth scrolling at work and we were all blown away with how cool it was.
Not novel, but fun way to get more resolution than you have but for narrow use cases.