Yes, there were some feats done already then. I guess people can't imagine what strange tweaks were used in the machines.
Take for instance the 48K ZX Spectrum: it had 16K ROM from 0000H to 3FFFH, then 16K RAM (some of which was display buffer) from 4000H to 7FFFH made of eight 16 kbit chips, and the remaining 32K RAM from 8000H to FFFFH was actually made of eight faulty 64kbit chips which Sinclair could buy cheaply. The chips that had failed in manufacturing testing were just tested again to determine whether the faulty part in the chip was in upper or lower half of the 64kbit address range. The high address bit of memory chip was connected permanently high or low to keep the address pointing to a working half of chips, thus enabling the extremely cheap broken 64kbit chips to be used as valid 32kbit chips.
(All eight chips of memory of course had to have be broken in the same upper/lower configuration).
The Psion chess program for Spectrum needed the 48K RAM model, although I think someone also wrote a full chess program for the 16K model (including castling, en passant and all).
Psion, by the way, was publisher for much of the early software for ZX Spectrum, including chess, spreadsheet and 3D design programs. Later on it was known for handheld devices, as well as the EPOC system which later on was to become Symbian, used in Nokia smartphones.