yes, the problem with graphics cards is really the strange card-specific stuff
needed to put it into a reasonable large, deep linear colour mode.
if we had only to write code for the hw cursor for each one,
that would be much less of a problem.  even some of the hardware
drawing code doesn't look hard to exploit ... once the card is in a sensible mode.

the cursor code always seemed fairly similar, so it might not be too hard
to have a table of ids just for that if necessary, and certainly card-specific
code for that is fairly easy to write.  one of the changes i
was making to the software cursor in inferno is to bring it
into a common interface with the hardware one
(allowing for the need to interact a bit with devdraw re. screen access).