I’m asking this because data in game cartridges always seem to be shown in hexadecimal values instead of binary. I reckon maybe hexadecimal is more convenient than binary.
In: Technology
Everything is binary to a computer. Anything else is just a convenience to humans.
It’s not 111111110000000000000000, it’s “red”. (24 bit colour)
It’s not 11011110101011011011111011101111, it’s 0xdeadbeef (binary to hex conversion)
It’s not 1100100, it’s 100. (binary to decimal conversion)
It’s not 01000101010011000100100100110101 it’s “ELI5” (text in binary)
Hexadecimal has a number range from 0 to 15 per “digit”, where A through F are considered digits. This has a binary range from 0000 to 1111 which means each hexadecimal digit represents *exactly* 4 bits. Since bytes are 8 bits that means 2 hex digits is a byte. Very convenient for humans, but by itself nothing in your computer cares except the software that’s doing the conversion for the humans.
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