[annywhey]

This is only sort of true in that while there are hardware supported things, the way in which you work with them is both more finicky than most APIs, and they get you relatively less close to a finished renderer.

For example, concepts like a scroll register don't typically appear in an abstracted API. They're a hardware detail that happens to assist in implementing a smooth scroll by reducing the necessary computation. But they aren't a "smooth scrolling API" because it works on the tilemap data only - you can also have sprites scroll. That necessitates a software implementation specifically for the task of sprite rendering. Witness the numerous NES games that either let sprites disappear when they hit negative X coordinates or put up a convenient black bar to hide it.