Good summary. A bit more generally, demos are often written to run under constrained conditions. They are also often written for competitions that set those conditions.

Sometimes, like in this case, the constraints are entirely dictated by the hardware, and the objective is just to make the most impressive demo given the particular device’s limitations, very often pushing the hardware way past what was commonly thought to be possible. Modifying the hardware is usually not allowed, but playing “dirty” in software by using undocumented and maybe even unintended, obscure implementation details of the platform is highly encouraged. No stone is left unturned.

8088MPH (by the same makers as 8088 Domination) is a very good example. For decades, nobody knew it would be possible to display 1024 colors, at the same time, on the original PC (which most nominally supports only 4 colors at the same time, which could be stretched to 8 with a trick). You can watch the demo here: https://youtu.be/yHXx3orN35Y And read about the methods used and invented here: https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-al...

Sometimes, there are also additional constraints like size limits, which is especially popular on more advanced hardware like modern PCs. For example, the objective could be to make the most impressive demo in 1024 bytes.