– “bits” as in 8-bit, 16-bit art and gaming systems

Question

– “bits” as in 8-bit, 16-bit art and gaming systems

In: Technology

Answer 1

A bit is basically a tiny little switch in a computer. Bits can only ever be on or off, which you’ll often hear called 1 and 0.

When programming computers, we like to be able to work with numbers bigger than 1, so we’ve invented a way of counting higher by putting bits together in a way that we call the binary number system, or just binary.

In binary, each bit represents a number that’s twice the last one. The first bit represents 1, the second 2, the third 4, the fourth 8, and so on and so forth. If the bit is on, you add the number it represents to the total, like so (smaller bits are on the right):

10110 -> 16 + 0 + 4 + 2 + 0 = 22
01101 -> 0 + 8 + 4 + 0 + 1 = 13

As it turns out, using this system you can represent any number if you have enough bits. But how many is “enough”? That’s where 8-bit, 16-bit, and so on come in. With 8 bits we can store numbers up to 255. With 16 bits, up to 65,535. 32 bits gives us numbers up to 4,294,967,295.

An 8-bit computer has enough switches in it that it can perform math on numbers up to 255 directly. If you want to use numbers bigger than that, you’ll need to come up with a clever way of storing one number into multiple sets of 8 bits, which makes the computer slower. Obviously, 255 is not a very big number, so as soon as it became affordable to add more switches to the machines, we did.

Side note: “8-bit art” is just a term for pixel art that looks like the kind of art you would see on an 8-bit game console. The number of bits does not directly affect the kind of graphics a computer can display, but 8-bit consoles were much slower than modern computers and could not run graphics that were very fancy.

Side note 2: You may hear about a “memory limit” related to bits. For instance, 32-bit computers can’t use more than about 4 Gigabytes of memory (4.29 billion bytes, to be exact). Why? Because 32-bit computers can’t count higher than 4.29 billion! Each byte needs to be numbered (so the computer can know which one is which) and after that you run out of numbers to give them!