> I use to write video games and it took months (yeah, months of hobby-time) to put a sprite on a screen.

I'm not sure how that happened - in DOS you could copy things to the framebuffer. There were libraries like Allegro which came with a million features including sound/UI/sprite rendering/animation/effects etc. out of the box.

But anyways copying a sprite to a screen is not hard even if you don't use a single piece of foreign code - you can read in a BMP file and just copy it row-by-row to the screen.