You are talking about hardware scrolling where you instruct the graphics hardware to read the image data from a specific address and to turn that into a visible picture signal. No it's not a standard OpenGL feature and is only supported by a handful of graphics cards. It was a feature on the Amiga, but is not in BlitzMax.
Considering the general speed of graphics cards today you shouldn't have any problem re-drawing the whole screen every frame.
Considering the general speed of graphics cards today you shouldn't have any problem re-drawing the whole screen every frame.