Um seems like youre in your PC era..
Nope, I'm talking about 70's, 80's and 90's Arcade games and to almost every extent console games. They have to run within a frame, it's basically the 1st unwritten rule of arcade games.
and im on a little older era were you had to write pixel by pixel the backgrounds, etc...
The only arcade motherboard that I can remember that used a bitmap display was SpaceInvaders and its clones(using basically the same board).
Space Invaders ran within a video frame btw.
Most others used multiple character mapped displays and hardware sprites.
It wasn't until the advent of Hard Drivin' (Atari) that they started going to pixel based displays (Hard Drivin' broke the frame rule btw and was universally declared unresponsive).
Is there an example of a (raster based) arcade game that doesn't run within the video frame?
and a while back we didnt care about anything else but a keyboard that worked for some BASIC programming
I'm from that era (I didn't use BASIC before though - it simply wasn't fast enough, nothing wrong with it however).
But with regards to games machines I think that you must be refering to the Spectrum or some other home computer, not a console or Arcade machine. Most people I know on these machines strived to make the game run within a frame, indeed many very good "tricks" were developed in order to make it look as if it was.
-Anthony