VESA VBE
A standardized BIOS extension that provided uniform access to high-resolution graphics modes on PC hardware, freeing developers from writing device drivers.
VESA VBE (Video Electronics Standards Association — Video BIOS Extension) was a blessing for DOS demo makers. Instead of writing a driver for every graphics card, you called standard BIOS functions to set a video mode and got back a linear framebuffer you could write pixels to directly. Support varied — some cards had full VBE 2.0, others only VBE 1.0 — but the standard meant a demo could ship as a single executable and still run on dozens of cards. Late-1990s 32-bit DOS demos lived and died by VBE, as it was the only practical way to get 800×600 or higher resolution across the installed base.