What exactly do people mean when they say the NES was an 8 bit console? I know that a bit in computer terms is a single piece of data that can be 1 or 0, but 8 of these doesn’t sound like enough to do all of the things you’d need to play a game like Mario. So what element of the console was 8 bits?
In: Technology
The “X bit” term in all cases refers to the word size (=largest single number) the processor can process in one calculation. Modern computers are 64-bit, which means CPUs can handle numbers up to 2^64 – 1 = 18446744073709551615 (just over 18.4 quintillion). An “8-bit” console can handle numbers up to 2^8 – 1 = 255. (The reason you subtract 1 is that 0 counts as the “first” number for computers, so an 8-bit system can handle number inputs between 00000000 and 11111111 in binary notation.)
This means, for instance, the console can only display 256 unique colors at one time, or play 256 distinct sounds, or index up to 256 different tiles/sprites/etc. As you can imagine, this is not a lot of room to work with, so early console programming required you to be VERY VERY efficient with your code and designs. There was zero room for wasted space.
For comparison, the SNES was a 16-bit console, which means it could do calculations up to 2^16 – 1 = 65535. That, as I’m sure you can tell, is a *huge* increase, and is why SNES games can be vastly more complex, detailed, etc. The music can invoke thousands of sounds, the color palette can have thousands of shades, etc. 32-bit is good enough to handle enough colors and sounds that the human senses can no longer distinguish the digital steps between them, but is still somewhat limiting, as it can only handle values up to about 4.29 billion. That sounds like a lot, but as memory and hard drive sizes got very large, it became very limiting. It is unlikely that we will need to switch to 128-bit computers any time in the next century; 18 quintillion is over 4 billion times larger (each step *squares* the previous value.) These days, many people have more than 4 GB of RAM, which exceeds 32-bit. *Nobody*, not even massive supercomputers, has 4.29 *billion* GB of RAM.
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