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
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.
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