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
People are making it fairly complex or are wrong. 8-bit does mean the “CPU” of it works with 8-bit values directly, which works on values between 0 and 255 in binary. It doesn’t mean it can only use 256 bytes of RAM. For things like graphics, you can see that it is using only a limited set of blocks/palettes which tend to use unique numbers in the 0-255 range telling the sprite engine what tile to draw.
3 might me a brick in super mario, while 1 means air and 20 means a question block. I made the numbers up, but that’s how it works internally.
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