eli5: 8 bit consoles

519 viewsOtherTechnology

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

9 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Eight bit refers to the word width. It means that the major components (CPU, memory) operate using a bus that’s eight bits wide. You can’t pass more than eight bits between components at a time.

Think of it like a highway. It would be eight lanes wide. A toll booth couldn’t deal with any more than eight vehicles at once.

If you want to have a value that requires 16 bits (like a memory address), you can’t. This is why thirty two bit processors were limited to using four gigabytes of memory, they simply couldn’t use addresses for larger amounts.

You are viewing 1 out of 9 answers, click here to view all answers.