Impressive 2D Action Games?

I haven't run into that kind of problem... but it may be possible. Then again you might as well make a few surfaces and use multiple smaller textures. This way it would certainly work even on low-end gfx cards.

There are several 3D accelerated 2d systems for blitz3d which are really easy to use and plenty fast. I believe Gosse has one called Nsprite... you may find it on blitzcoder.