The NES and Gameboy Color are both considered 8-Bit. What are the technical differences in the graphics that allowed GBC games to look so different?

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One thing I’ve noticed is that on Gameboy Color, there appears to be actually less allowable colors on screen, however Gameboy Color games seem to in general look impressive compared to most NES games. I have a bit of technical understanding but I bet there’s a lot of folks out there who really know their stuff when it comes to the hardware specs and limitations.

In: Technology

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Anonymous 0 Comments

The 8,16,32,64 bits were just used to refer to the addressable memory range for the CPU.

8 bits means it could address up to 2^8 addresses, etc etc. We have been at 64 bits for the last 15 years or so and CPU/GPU performance has advanced a lot. Performance all depends on the specific hardware design.

It was used as an advertising term back in the day to indicate how advanced a console was but it was practically speaking a rather meaningless metric.

The differences in the graphics quality are due to the different hardware used in the two. One is a console that connects to AC and has the ability to use a lot of power and has space to cool. The other is a compact system run off batteries.

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