There is an excellent video from 33c3 about Gameboy internals and all the wonderful tricks that can be utilized when writing software for it. https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8029-the_ultimate_game_boy_talk

C3 never ceases to surprise me. Thanks!

One could at least describe the "text mode" of VGA/CGA/EGA video hardware as actually being the same kind of "tile mode" you find in consoles. And in slightly more modern video cards (the kind you'd find in a Windows 95/98 machine), the mouse cursor was usually a hardware sprite. (Even today, mouse cursors seem to frequently escape OS gamma correction for some reason...)

And even without a dedicated scrolling register, John Carmack famously managed to get the IBM PC to do scrolling by manipulating the screen buffer address (and emulating sprites by manually redrawing those parts) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_tile_refresh

My first computer was an Acorn Electron, and that had hardware scrolling, too.

I don't think it had hardware sprites, but game programmers of that era often used compiled sprites to improve performance.