AuthorTopic: What exactly is 8-bit?  (Read 6694 times)

Offline PypeBros

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Re: What exactly is 8-bit?

Reply #10 on: September 20, 2012, 08:37:50 am
C64 is not quite 6502, it's 6510, very similar tho.
Standing corrected. I must have been mis-informed by mindbenders' promotional tape featured in my brother's tune

Quote
And the SID has only 3 channels even. I think the NES has 5, but on the NES each channel is fixed to a waveform and one is reserved for samples or something.
Yep, since they used special chips for sound and graphics, you'd have different limitations from system to system, but the basis is the same: you've got hardware capable of producing some limited waveforms, and only limited number of generators. Comparatively, a 16-bit machine has (much) more channels and is more capable of using arbitrary samples. Vocal samples are feasible on a 8-bit system, but they typically require nearly the full CPU power to be played, for instance.

Offline Hideon

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Re: What exactly is 8-bit?

Reply #11 on: September 22, 2012, 11:43:21 pm
NES uses 16 colors simultaneously on the screen. If you see at games like Final Fantasy, 4 grayscale colors are almost permanent on the screen; two for interfaces and several things, black and white).
There are almost 4 colors for the charas, 2 for backgrounds and I think 2 more for objects or enemies.

Indeed, the GPU of NES is 4bits, not 8bits, ahd that has a lot to say on processing power. SNES had about 7 or 8 graphic modes, and each with variations in dimensions and more. GPU have some data processing capacity which is reflected in the screen resolution and color depth (in computing the resolution is for example 800x600x32, because that is the size in bits graphic data display buffer).

Consoles were 8-bit referring to the CPU. Similarly, PCM chips (music synthesizers) allowed values 8bits equally manageable with 8-bits, for consistency with the CPU and probably to facilitate data handling.
Also, the sprites are 8x8. If you remember (?), Most things used textures sizes equal to powers of 2 because it is easier or faster for the processor to handle such data.

PD.- My english sucks...

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Re: What exactly is 8-bit?

Reply #12 on: September 22, 2012, 11:55:02 pm
NES uses 16 colors simultaneously on the screen.

The NES can have quite a few more colours on screen than 16.
(3x4)+1 for bg = 13 and 3x4 for sprites = 12 makes 25 colours at once, and this is without doing rastersplits.
There are no ugly colours, only ugly combinations of colours.