The Ataris had this capability before the Commodores, without the crashing. They were designed to scroll entire screens of material almost effortlessly from the beginning. When you combined it with the redefinable (and color) character sets, you could put a scrolling map of Europe in a few K of memory.
Ataris had coprocessors for 256-color graphics, sound, I/O, and intelligent peripherals. You could mix text and graphics modes on the screen line by line. They had hardware sprites. The 800 (and its successors) even had an S-video output. All in 1978.
