@@chunkypotato idk theres no real info on what bits they use. Ps4 could be 64 or 128. I'm leaning more towards 128 because the ps2 and dreamcast were 128 bit, with the xbox being only 32 bits. either way the whole bit thing stopped mattering after the dreamcast tbh
yet the textures can go from 16x16 to 512x512,and the rendering distances and colours used are way too many to be called 8 bit,over 256 and you can have with mods over 256 items and over 256 blocks,soo.....*ahh* *facepalm*
I find 8 bit games(actual 8-bit games) to be a prime example of how much you can do with limited resources. The fact that a few kilobytes is enough to have music, different levels, different monsters, and an entire story to tell the player, all that in such a tiny amount of data storage, you can see how programmers and developers really extended their resourcefulness and didn't let limitations stop them from creating something phenomenal.
They were able to do that because they had direct or almost-direct access to the actual hardware and just wrote pointers to the specific items in the graphic array of the memory devices they were writing those games for. That would still be the case now if hardware manufacturers weren't actively fighting against this and the only access you have to the actual memory is via an API that's purposely convoluted as to obscure the actual hardware architecture.
I meant: Stardew Valley has actually a much higher resolution than the pixel look want's you to believe. You can see that when they didn't draw extra sprites for certain animations but just rotated and scaled the existing sprites. Then one "pixel" might be 0.5 or 1.5 the length of another pixel and other pixels are at an angle and not aligned to the supposed pixel raster.
@@nugget6635 Flicker is actually not a glitch, it's an intentional programming "trick" to allow for more sprites on the screen at once. I found this out after trying NES development (which is very difficult, especially for someone who struggles with coding like myself)
@@williamdrum9899 yeah. it's programmed into the game. it's not built into the hardware, like most people _assume_. the way it's programmed in games is also really difficult.
I know this thread is a bit old, but this isn't necessarily correct. A bit refers to the smallest amount of data that can be addressed by a cpu, and is somewhat related to processor word length. It just so happens to be 8 bits on modern systems, but can theoretically be any value. Early computers from the 50's and 60's used different sizes for their bytes.
Hydrochloric Acid Correct. I wish I remember what it was, but I was watching a video about a retro piece of hardware (I want to say it was an ancient arcade architecture) that said the CPU used 19-bit word sizes. Seriously? What sadistic person made a 19-bit word-sized CPU? But going back, you can find all kinds of odd word sizes: 9, 12, 26, 39 and even higher. The world settled in on power-of-two word sizes because they made the most sense in the context of computer science.
I just commented “are you game makers toolkit?” And then saw this comment. Thanks for clarifying. Subbing solely based on who you are. I’m sure this channel is full of quality video if you’re here.
But traditional animation is 2D animation. Are you saying that tradigital animation is not the same as traditional animation? Because they're similar, but one is done digitally and the other is done on paper and cels.
there was on arcade game that allowed you to shoot down icbms which I believe was called "missile command". if you were good enough to get to a certain point in the game, probably frame 256, it would give you back all of your missile launchers even if they had been destroyed.
8 bit refers to the data bus of the processor, so it refers to the ammount of data which can be stored inside address in the memory and that can be moved in one cpu cycle
What people called "x-bits" in the late 80s-90s was always very vague, and more of a buzzword than anything. At first they meant the processor word size, but then you had processors that had 16 bits words but only had an 8 bit external bus size, so their speed was limited. Then you also had the number of bits per pixel used to display graphics. So got things like the TurboGrafx-16 were the CPU was 8-bit, it had supposedly a 16-bit graphics processor, but could only make use of 9-bits of color. In the end what actually matters is the quality of the games.
X-bit refers to the number of binary values the processor can work with. 4 Bit processors work with 4-bit binary (0000 or 0101). 8 bit processors work with 8-bit binary (00000000 or 00101011). 4 bit, like said in the video, can only store values from 0-15. 8 bit can store values 0-255. Today, we are using 64 bit processors (mostly, there are some 32 bit processors being used). They are capable of storing values from 0-9,223,372,036,854,775,807 (9.2 quintillion). processors with higher bits support more RAM and can run more efficiently. (I also believe that some programs are smaller when 64 bit than their 32 bit counterparts.) 32bit processors only support 4 GigaBytes of RAM. 64 bit Processors Support up to 16.8 Exabytes or 16.8 million Terabytes.
It means nothing. There are very many things to consider (ALU width, registers width, data bus width, plus multiplexing on the top), so it is not really a tech term, more of marketing stuff. 6502 can be a good example of very 8-bit architecture, though, as it has 8-bit ALU, 8-bit registers including the stack, 8-bit data bus, sees the address space as set of 256-byte pages, and is not capable for atomic 16-bit calculations. For most of other CPUs it is not that clear. For one, Z80 considered 8-bit, but has 4-bit ALU, but also capable for atomic 16-bit calculations.
I thought basically it meant that with 8 bits the programmers binary that makes up the programming of the game has 8 spaces for the 0's and 1's to make up information.....that may be oversimplifying. ..
Great vid. My personal take on the whole loose definition of 8-bit is that now is the perfect opportunity to create games that may not have been possible on old hardware for one reason or another but evoke the same kind of nostalgia and sport a similar look to one. If someone wants to try to emulate something an old system would have been capable of then they're free to do so, but strict adherence to those limitations is not mandatory by any means.
These are a caveman's version of video games, It brought down the video game industry as low as it could go,it's proof that jesus died in vain and legally changed his middle name to FUCKING
Good video ! I like NES specificities like 8x8 sprites, and the explaination why some parts of sprite sometimes disappear at 3m08 ! Thx for this video !
Actually, there's a 8x16 sprite mode, but it's not very useful unless the game scrolls vertically. It also limits you to 32 sprites, so in essence, there's still 64 sprites, but they are automatically glued together for you by the hardware.
What pisses me off even more is when someone says "8-bit music". It's friggin Square and triangle waves you assclowns, maybe with a white noise channel to spice things up a bit.
yes, the square wave on the nes was more like 3-bit. not sure about the triangle or noise channels. the samples channel was 1-bit (delta modulated) but with a fairly high sample rate (which i believe was variable, and had to share clock cycles with cpu instructions)
Actually, pulse (not square, because of the duty control) wave is 1-bit by the nature, wouldn't be pulse/square otherwise. But pulse channel DACs are 4-bit, providing 16 levels of volume. The triangle is 4-bit, a counter sends 0-15-0 sequence to the DAC. Noise is 1-bit by the nature of digital noise generators (LFSR), but also has 4-bit DAC to control the volume. DPCM uses 1-bit encoding for the data, but sample channel DAC is actually 7-bit, although in the DPCM mode it only uses 6 bits. So one could count a lot of bits in the NES sound hardware, but 8 is nowhere to be found.
umm well we were talking about the term "8 bit music" and using NES as an example. yeah obviously chiptunes encompasses any music produced by a chip (or at least music that sounds like it is)
I can't stand when music claims to be 8-bit, but isn't. True 2A03 8-bit music only has 4 sound channels. The UA-cam channel Bulby makes "8-bit" remixes, but they sound nothing like the NES sound channels.
I can't stand when people talk about 8-bit but only refer to the NES. SID was better sound processor, so there! Though I do feel your pain, it appears that to the young 'uns 8 bit means nothing more than "composed solely to square waves"
***** Hate to go all Four Yorkshireman on you, but back when I were a lad, t' Commodore 64 only 'ad THREE VOICES and only had t' choice of square wave, sine wave, sawtooth, noise, and "pulse" whatever that were... Mind, we did 'ave adjustable Attack, Decay, Sustain and Release on t' different voices and we could reprogam t' different channels to t' different waveforms anywhile, it were reet good in fact!
Señor Inteligente There are 2 square channels, 1 triangle, and 1 noise. (dpcm could be a 5th channel, but if you want TRUE chip tune, forgo the dpcm channel) The square channels can have 3 different wave forms and the volume can be adjusted. The triangle had 1 form, and no possibility to for volume adjust. Noise has 2 forms, and volume adjust is possible.
Being old enough to remember 8 bit computers and when they were brand new, I take 8-bit to mean the hardware and its foibles. So seeing so-called "8-bit" games where sprites rotate and don't snap to the actual pixelly grid, making it clear that they're actually modern games running on a modern system, just that the sprites are given that deliberate blocky look, it's kind of a lie... it's an aesthetic choice that stills jars. It's like, why use that look if you can't pull it off?
Seeing the pixels rotate makes me very upset. Games like Mega Man 9 and 10, Shovel Knight, Freedom Planet and Sonic Mania have incredible Sprite work for modern systems however.
+JohnRegularYum This guy (@britishgaming) actually makes videos like this on his own channel (called Game Maker's Toolkit) as well - I would recommend checking it out if you haven't already. :)
When pixels size are in consistent, when the pixels rotate and when the sprites have too many colors to where it's a SNES or Genesis game pallet with NES shaped sprites it makes me really uncomfortable.
When it comes to micro-processors it commonly refers to the word size, some 8-bit processors had 16 bit data buses, while still being able to operate on 8 bit words at a time. Said that is not as clear cut as some did have narrower ALUs, and some had instructions for working with 16-bit data.
Well, an 8 bit number can be one of 256 different numbers. One doesn't have "256 places to store information". Flappy bird looks like a DS game. Spectrum has that stupid monochrome 8×8 tile thing as its biggest limitation (other than 1-bit sound).
FPGAs are really great for those interesting in retro-computing or learning how a CPU works. I am implementing Ben Eater's 8-bit computer in an FPGA in a series of videos on my channel for anyone interested. Very cool stuff!
You missed the entire point of the video. There's no "8bit" style, only a replication of what popular 8bit consoles at the time could produce. Shovel knight isn't any "bit", and if you consider CPUs then it would be 32/64bit with an aesthetic similar to consoles like the NES. The "bitness" of the machine does not always determine graphical power. The Atari ST was 16bit but only could produce 16 colours at once, and the PC Engine has an 8bit CPU, but has similar graphics to the SNES/Megadrive. Early IBM PCs were 16/32bit but depending on the graphics card, only could produce 4/16 colours at once.
CodeNameZ That was just marketing speech, I don't really care what the devs have said when the end product looks more like Super Metroid or Castlevania 4 rather than Ducktales or Super Mario 3. It only adapted the gameplay elements from nes era, but graphically it's definitely snes style.
Mate. I know it's a five year old video but I must commend you on explaining this simply, concisely and clearly, with no other nonsense cluttering up your video. Cheers.
1:34 I want that NES with the black power and reset buttons. Gotta be highly collectible. Can't find really anything about it either. Also at 1:37 the Zelda cart says "The legend of Zelda sold separately" I bet that cart has value.
I think "8-bit" style games exist as nothing more than an aesthetic choice and to play on the nostalgia of old farts like me who remember their Commodore 64s from the first time round. What they mean to these young'uns I have no idea, but I'm guessing it means simple, easy and throwaway, the complete opposite of actual 8 bit games which took their cue from the arcades. Arcade games were designed to kill you quickly and frustratingly so you'd keep chucking in 10p pieces to beat your high score. Though back in the day arcade games were referred to as "coin ops" (short for coin operated) rather than arcade games as you'd find them in quite a few other places apart than arcades in the olden days (at least in the UK)
GeoNeilUK I've played my fair share on arcade machines... on emulators. Got fed up of pressing the "insert a coin" button to be honest. I know it's not an arcade game or even 2D, but have you read up on how much effort was put into Crash Bandicoot? They had to keep tweaking the levels and whatnot, let it build, often overnight, then see if it actually worked well on the PS1, mostly due to hardware limitations. Crazy stuff! And nowadays there are plenty of shoddily-programmed "8-bit" games which I can't even get running smoothly on mid/high-range hardware. Also, you seem to know your stuff (or at least sound like you do). Do you know of anywhere (preferably Scotland) with a real pinball machine? I should probably look in some arcade-type places but it's never really crossed my mind at the right time.
The King of Fighters is shifted to 3D models because the 2D Pixel Art was too expensive. The rendering of a pixel art game is kinda tricky because of the resolution and the way it works on different aspect ratios. It's not that it's easier or cheaper. It's an esthetic choice, the sad part is that the audience/the players see it as a limitation or as a retro-inspired visuals not as a choice like hand-drawn or cellshading...
As an indie game developer, that's absolutely accurate. Good art is difficult and time consuming, and if it's too high-quality there are more code complications to take into account than when you can control each pixel almost individually. Some people try to emulate older games' art styles as a way to hide this facet or as an attempt to look better, as it worked for those games, whereas other developers try to adapt to larger color palettes and more precise rendering.
Your video is amazingly in depth and seems quite factually correct from what I remember, although I'm not going to go through the effort of verifying it. So, it is quite interesting that when you talk about 256 colour graphics, you displayed Sonic the Hedgehog as an example, when actually the Sega Genesis Megadrive was capable of only approximately 64 colours simultaneously displayed on screen. Actually it's 4 palettes of 16 colours each to give 64, but actually it's a little less than 64 when you consider that a colour in each palette is actually supposed to indicate which pixels are transparent.
Thanks for this video. It's to mention that the problem in den 80's was that RAM (random access memory) was very expensive. To make a computer or playing console cheap enough but still allowing colorful graphics, such restrictions/color concepts in the video chip were needed.
I wonder if 16-bit retro is a thing. Pretty sure the SNES, Amiga, Atari ST were 16-bit, and I've seen some attempts to emulate that art style. But never hear it called 16-bit style and so far mostly I've only seen it in illustrations for stuff like New Wave/Retro music.
The SNES was the best 16bit console in terms of hardware by far. 1: Sound was clearly and unambiguously better with SNES because of more stereo channels. 2: SNES color pallet and simultaneous color limits were vastly larger than Genesis as well as sprite limits were much higher. 3: Way more buttons on the game controller and well designed for ease of access as well. The Genesis's CPU was considerably faster than the SNES, but this is a moot point. The SNESs video memory and sound peripherals were so efficient that the SNES did not require such a fast processor to match the performance of the Genesis, and even surpass it. Sega tried to market their faster Genesis processor in the early 90s calling it " blast processing ". It was a misleading sales gimmick.
Informative video! However, you made a mistake at 3:08. Imagine NES sprites are numbered from 0 to 63. If you have the following row of sprites on a single line *32 4 63 12 28 7 34 60 48* It's not the rightmost sprite (48) that is going to be invisible, but rather sprite 63, as sprites are displayed in their order in RAM, taking a whopping 256 bytes of RAM (Or 4 bytes per sprite).
I've only ever known "8-bit" as referring to older video games, such as from as early as the Atari 2600; to the Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Master System (yes I'm aware there's other computers and consoles that were 8-bit, I didn't intend to list every single one of them). When ever I see or hear of games like Shovel Knight, Castle In The Darkness or Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures, usually these are ones you'll find on Steam, and I've always known them as "pixel art" types of games, because obviously they could never be run on consoles like the NES or SMS, so..... who ever refers to the newer "pixel art" games as "8-bit" (or "16-bit" or "any-bit") are just idiots.
I think the snes could, if you really wanted it to, run a very simplified version of minecraft. XD After all, it ran doom, and it could do 3d graphics and basic texture mapping with the right add-ons. Would look very little like the real thing though. It does sound like an amusing project to implement, come to think of it. XD
there was a virsion of minecraft called minecraft 4k, where the entire game was stored in just 4 kilobytes. the snes or even the nes could definitely run that
Marked as favourite because it better (shorted and more visualized, forgot the 00 01 10 11 thing) explained than another video about 8-bit. Y'know, visualizing things makes things much more understandable and memorable, believe me!
It does actually. As a result, an 8-bit cpu has no issues dealing with 16-bit values but the programmer has to treat them as two 8-bit chunks instead and add the carry to the higher 8-bit part during additions for example. Thankfully though, pretty much every CPU detects carry/overflow so it's easy to do.
Sorry for the long comment, Bedsitdweller, although it's actually not as long as it looks if you skim over the enclosed sample of code marked off with ">" signs. //I thought that 8 bit meant the processor could process 1 byte at a time and a 16 bit processor could do 2.// No, that's clock speed. Even the oldest game consoles process way more than 1 or 2 bytes at any given time, or else the screen would only light up 1 pixel at a time! (Even if "at a time" meant tiny fractions of a second, it would still cause a strobing effect if that were the case.) Bit architecture (8-bit, 16-bit, etc.) is the number of bits in a single character of source code. Despite popular belief, you could theoretically have today's graphics rendered from 8-bit character code in ASCII, and that's because a color on a pallet or an angle on a polygon or sprite (and so on and so forth) need NOT be limited to a single character on a sheet of source code! (However, doing so would tank your console in sales, precisely because most of the general public holds the incorrect belief that bit architecture is a measurement of graphical capability.) Have you ever seen a sheet of source code? Something that looks like this? > RossiterUp=c(11,2,3*(20/18),4*(20/18)) > RossiterUp [1] 11.000000 2.000000 3.333333 4.444444 > RossiterUpPerMinute=c(0.55,0.1,0.17,0.22) > RossiterUpPerMinute [1] 0.55 0.10 0.17 0.22 > RossiterDown=c(13,6,7,6) > RossiterDown [1] 13 6 7 6 > RossiterDownPerMinute=c(0.65,0.3,0.35,0.3) > RossiterDownPerMinute [1] 0.65 0.30 0.35 0.30 > CreeksideUp=c(9,10,4,14) > CreeksideUp [1] 9 10 4 14 > CreeksideUpPerMinute=c(0.45,0.5,0.2,0.7) > CreeksideUpPerMinute [1] 0.45 0.50 0.20 0.70 > CreeksideDown=c(4,3,10,9) > CreeksideDown [1] 4 3 10 9 > CreeksideDownPerMinute=c(0.2,0.15,0.5,0.45) > CreeksideDownPerMinute [1] 0.20 0.15 0.50 0.45 > CherryTreeUp=c(11,15,5,4) > CherryTreeUp [1] 11 15 5 4 > CherryTreeUpPerMinute=c(0.55,0.75,0.25,0.2) > CherryTreeUpPerMinute [1] 0.55 0.75 0.25 0.20 > CherryTreeDown=c(7,6,13,8) > CherryTreeDown [1] 7 6 13 8 > CherryTreeDownPerMinute=c(0.35,0.3,0.65,0.4) > CherryTreeDownPerMinute [1] 0.35 0.30 0.65 0.40 > > mean(RossiterUp) [1] 5.194444 > mean(RossiterUpPerMinute) [1] 0.26 > mean(RossiterDown) [1] 8 > mean(RossiterDownPerMinute) [1] 0.4 > mean(CreeksideUp) [1] 9.25 > mean(CreeksideUpPerMinute) [1] 0.4625 > mean(CreeksideDown) [1] 6.5 > mean(CreeksideDownPerMinute) [1] 0.325 > mean(CherryTreeUp) [1] 8.75 > mean(CherryTreeUpPerMinute) [1] 0.4375 > mean(CherryTreeDown) [1] 8.5 > mean(CherryTreeDownPerMinute) [1] 0.425 For the sake of intellectual honesty, this section of code is not *actually* from a video game or from the underlying engine of one. It is in fact from a session I spent in R (a specialized programming language for Biology-related statistics) for part of my Master's Thesis. Nevertheless, you get the idea. Let's consider the line "RossiterDownPerMinute=c(0.65,0.3,0.35,0.3)". In 8-bit code (which is the minimum for ASCII to operate, by the way), the capital R at the beginning of that line would be 01010010. The lowercase r at the end of the word "Rossiter" would be 01110010. The opening parenthetical in the Create Set function ("c(...)") would be 00101000. The closing parenthetical would be 00101001. In 16-bit code, 8 0's would be added to left of each: 0000000001010010, 0000000001110010, 0000000000101000, and 0000000000101001, respectively. The real advantage of higher bit architectures is not better or more complex graphics, but rather, the ability to incorporate higher-order Unicode characters in the underlying source code. A 64-bit character architecture can theoretically accommodate the first 18.4 *quintillion* characters, and the actual Unicode standard hasn't even been developed to anywhere near that number of characters! Again, though, most of the general public holds the incorrect belief that bit architecture is a measurement of graphical capability.
WillStrop2008 What the hell? You just throw Randoms things together. You are talking about character encoding. That is no real relation to the Bit System you are using, there are different standards with different bit usages, but that's it. How you explained it, we could easily use 8bit architecure for everything. But we also can allocate more RAM, save bigger numbers or even calculate more precisely. 3D Games wouldn't be possible how they are today if we would still use 8bit. Also alles new consoles are 64bit not 128bit.
MrDavibu Character encoding has *everything* to do with Bit Architecture. Bit Architecture, by definition, is the number of bits in each character of source code. Just on the off chance you thought "character encoding" specifically meant the visible characters you see on the screen (I've run into other people who thought that), No. That's not the nature of source code. Unicode is an extension of ASCII, and unlike raw ASCII, it extends into characters that require more than 8 bits to encode. While other (far less common) standards do exist, *all* of them require a consistent number of bits per character. (So no, I never said "everything" was possible with 8 bits per character. Not if you wish to encode foreign alphabets like Greek and Hebrew.) Critical question: Which aspect of game play mechanics or graphics is limited in principle to only a single character of source code? If the answer is "nothing," than you can see how the number of bits in a single character is irrelevant to those higher level aspects of game programming. Storing larger numbers can be accomplished by storing the same number in multiple addresses, as long as those addresses are consecutive. That technique can affect more precise calculation as well (via floating point values), but again, the consecutive addresses thing doesn't work for character encoding. Well, the DreamCast and GameCube were 128-bit, but later console generations may well have gone back down to 64-bit architecture for the very reason I explained above. Thanks for the heads up if they did. Anyway, keep in mind that we're talking about the length of a "word" in Binary, which, despite being called a "word," corresponds to a single letter of Source Code. Multiple "words" (letters) can be used consecutively to encode more complicated information.
fascinating!! thank you, especially for the visualizaation of the mario constraints. Can you do a video on how those constraints relate to the actual hardware? like all the magic numbers, like why 968, 13, 4, 1, 8x8, 3 + 1, 12 etc
Julian Rey and yet no games on the NES looked like Shovel Knight. anyway, I take back what I said 2 years ago about hurting. I fear that people will hurt me
Yes except sometimes it doesn't. When talking about an 8-bit processor yeah, when talking about an 8-bit console... maybe, and when talking about "8-bits game/graphics" all bets are out, probably means the programmer did the graphics himself and used that as an excuse lol Not saying that there aren't cool looking pixelated/low-res graphics out there.
Well, imagine long ago, when everything was black and white, the first car. It had 1 cylinder, went 18mph. Blew everyone's minds. That's 8-bit. Then racing consoles came out with 2 cylinders, then four and now we all drive V8s and the consoles have some turbos too.
Thank you for actually writing it down. I never heard of the game and heard him say "Lat Ma Luna". When I tried to google the name I found absolutely nothing at all which was frustrating as hell.
When 8bit is said, a certain image appears in mind. Its like a retro genre. On my channel I use limitations and work with 8x8 sprites. Im no professional but i think im pulling it off pretty well lol.
Da.shArk87 It's an NES game that contained 52 games on one cartridge, and it was horrific; games filled with glitches, broken mechanics, terrible graphics, etc. Broken games, licensed or otherwise, did exist on the NES, but because they were broken, they were long forgotten. The games you mentioned were good games that people still talk about to this day and are getting re-released on Virtual Console and other platforms.
ohh maybe it was an indie studio that sold Action 52, many indie studios made games at that time.. I had a smiliar cardridge like you on my original NES with like 70 games only of olympic sports, it was quite fun.. i miss those games actually :)
Da.shArk87 there were TONS of game breaking glitches. this fantasy is a lie spread throughout the internet that is easily disproven. most roms you download have been patched. in fact, new glitches are found all the time as people go back and replay old games. you are just wrong.
We don't need to know about your menstrual flow... And technically, Ps4 uses a 64 bit multi core processor. We have been in the 64 bit era since N64. N64 wins. MENSTRUAL FLOW.
8 bit does NOT have 256 places to store information it has EIGHT places to store information, with a possible 256 combinations. (basically 8 bit can be a value from 1 to 256 (0-255)
I don't laugh at any graphics based on their crudeness, just on poor artistic choices. Games have never been about faking the real world to me, so as long as it fits together in its own world and enables quality gameplay it's fine.
So, in short-- On a technical level, both the NES, and Gameboy utilize 2-bit graphics. While the Atari VCS (or 2600), MSX homecomputers, Intellivision, Colecovision, and the ZX Spectrum, all use 1-bit graphics. (Some cheat though, with 2 colors per 8x8, or per 8x1 segment.)
I'm honestly fucking tired of this quasi-retro bullshit indie games. They aren't even trying to mimic the limitations of true 8-bit systems, and it looks just plain disguisting in some cases. They are so overused, because they are dirty cheap to make; you can make them yourself in ms paint.
Alex Ander Most pixel art games are imitating 16bit/early 32bit generation, usually running at 256 or more colours. I don't see these pixel art games emulating the colour scheme of the ZX spectrum or the limited palette of the NES for instance :)
+RozumariSama Maybe they AREN'T all trying to mimic an 8-bit system's limitations... I think some want to imitate the Genesis or SNES type of bits (I forget if it's called 16 or 32 bit tbh) But I can see where your frustration comes from instead of them marking all pixel games as "retro", perhaps they should just say "pixel art style." Cause there's a difference between "retro" and "pixel art."
Mark?! This video just showed up in my recommended, I’ve been watching Game Maker’s Toolkit since it’s early beginning days. I didn’t know he did anything before it though
Nobody would buy the games if they looked like actual 8-bit games. The color palette would be too limited (the C64 not only had just 16 colors, this was also out of a fixed palette of just 16 drab colors) and there would be other, very severe limitations (the ZX Spectrum could only display 2 colors in each 8x8 pixel block, for example). From a technical standpoint, most so called "retro" games are closer to the late 16-bit generation like Neo Geo, late Amiga titles, Sega Genesis etc. but running at much higher resolution.
While the Atari ST was 16bit yet only could display 16 colours. The later MSX computers were 8bit and yet could display up to 256 colours at once. 16bit != better graphics automatically.
Fun fact about NES: every color is stored in PPU as a strict value of analog signal, so NES doesn't prepare high quality RGB frame, transform it into analog signal and send to TV, instead it just combines predefined analog signals, what effects in different colors between different NES consoles, TV's and even different video cables. Search for "Super Mario Bros" graphics, the sky is from blue to even pink, goombas are from brown to orange and so on.
#Warning: I am an Engineer and I'm here to explain something. Sorry, but this wasn't fully explained clearly. "8-bit" is in reference to the 8-bit registers of the processor. They did say "8-bit processors" but didn't really explain what that means. The biggest two issues on processor register size is the amount of memory you can address and how large of chunks of data the processor can use at one time slice. Modern example would be the Windows XP machines with 32-bit processors could only use 4 Gigabytes of Ram max (2^32), that hard memory restriction was the biggest limitation of those machines. The true 8-bit processors could only access 256 bytes and only do calculations on values of 0-255 at one time. Everything in this video is an effect/consequence, 8-bit registers are the cause/reason.
Couldn't 32-bit processors have used PAE to access more RAM, though? I heard that the main reason Intel was forced to go 64-bit on x86 was because of AMD.
@@pennyandrews3292 Yeah addressing is usually not the same as the word size. 8-bit processors did commonly have 12 or 16-bit addressing, and some 16-bit processors had 20 or 24bit addressing available. x86 real mode has 20-bit addressing, and there are many other different modes in x86 itself, some with pagination including PAE that you mentioned. With PAE you have a virtual 32-bit address space for each process, but the OS has 64-bits page table entries but less than than can be used for addressing, as it stores flags and other housekeeping there, it's fairly complex and hierarchical. But long story short on 32-bit x86 you can have up to 64GB of RAM using PAE, which is one of the x86 native memory management modes. Aside from addressing, there is the whole data bus thing which can have a width on its own, the data being where the processor reads/writes the data it addressed using what we mentioned above, that also varies a lot depending on what architecture we're talking about, and also doesn't match the internal word size in some cases. So, unless you specify what you're talking about "bits" doesn't actually mean that much. But when we say 8-bit processor the common thing is to assume we're talking about word size, or at least the word size the processor exposes to the developer as some had 4-bit internal words... it can be complicated to say the least heh, but the common thing we we're talking about the processor is to assume it to be the word size.
And now 8bits dominating the NFT spaces. Even the old games are coming back like Faketown which is 8bits too. the old styles are coming back and its really good.
For me... 8-bit is anything that looks like a NESS game or maybe an Atari game. Once you push past that, your in 16-bit territory, and if you push past anything like that and you get into 32-bit looking graphics like you might see in a DS game like Castlevania Dawn of sorrow. For me it IS the amount of colors, maybe even resolution. If it looks like an old Atari or NESS game it's 8-bit If it looks like a Sega Genesis or SNESS game than it's 16-bit If it looks like a DS or PS1 game, than it's 32-bit... Depends on how far you push the visuals and colors.
in modern "8-bit" games, even if they have flickering and colors and pixely graphics, there is one thing thats common in almost all of them. *ROTATED PIXELS*
Thanks for the video! This is silly but when I was younger I thought 8 bit meant that every character and object was made by 8 pixels...the bits XD. But then I counted Mario's pixels and of course it was not 8...
If you want to be technical, Mario is actually 2 sprites that are both 8 pixels wide placed next to each other. (16 pixels tall though since the NES could do that without taking another sprite slot.)
Since all games these days (with rare exceptions) are 32 or 64-bit, since that's all that the processor can run, then what do we call these games that are trying emulate 8-bit styles?
Yet most of those '8-bit' games look like something I expect from the 16-bit computers.
Most look like 32bit games on the gba
Fun fact: when 64 bit processor was created it was enough powerful that ps5 and xbox series x is a 64 bit console
@@Faoijhfr4rsgioi false. newer systems are 128 bit
@@LLotad uh no. newer systems are still 64 bit. and they're honestly probably gonna remain that way for a long, long time
@@chunkypotato idk theres no real info on what bits they use. Ps4 could be 64 or 128. I'm leaning more towards 128 because the ps2 and dreamcast were 128 bit, with the xbox being only 32 bits. either way the whole bit thing stopped mattering after the dreamcast tbh
person: "Minecraft is 8-bit"
me: *facepalm*
yet the textures can go from 16x16 to 512x512,and the rendering distances and colours used are way too many to be called 8 bit,over 256 and you can have with mods over 256 items and over 256 blocks,soo.....*ahh* *facepalm*
+JosephKing75 CBP not only that but MineCraft uses Voxel style graphics if I recall correctly.
Taylor Ringo
exactly,it used to not have voxel graphics.
It still uses textures though
+Taylor Ringo It uses voxels to store information. When it renders to screen it uses polygons.
I find 8 bit games(actual 8-bit games) to be a prime example of how much you can do with limited resources. The fact that a few kilobytes is enough to have music, different levels, different monsters, and an entire story to tell the player, all that in such a tiny amount of data storage, you can see how programmers and developers really extended their resourcefulness and didn't let limitations stop them from creating something phenomenal.
A few, is an understatement. Super mario bros used 40kb. Most games made later used 256kb.
This comment is funny after watching the video. When you say 'actual 8 bit', which one do you mean? lol
They were able to do that because they had direct or almost-direct access to the actual hardware and just wrote pointers to the specific items in the graphic array of the memory devices they were writing those games for. That would still be the case now if hardware manufacturers weren't actively fighting against this and the only access you have to the actual memory is via an API that's purposely convoluted as to obscure the actual hardware architecture.
@@rusi6219 Yeah, but doesn't change the fact that it's impressive no matter what. What a time to be alive. And this is outdated technology.
@@marcuscarana9240 I'm just pointing out that this would still be possible to do in many ways if it wasn't for the industry being anti-consumer
I wish indie devs would gravitate towards the 16bit era.
Far FAR more appealing.
I think Stardew Valley looks like SNES (if you ignore all the effects, rotation and scaling that wouldn't be possible on a real SNES).
bloody_albatross scaling is possible on a snes if you're talking about what i think you're talking
I meant: Stardew Valley has actually a much higher resolution than the pixel look want's you to believe. You can see that when they didn't draw extra sprites for certain animations but just rotated and scaled the existing sprites. Then one "pixel" might be 0.5 or 1.5 the length of another pixel and other pixels are at an angle and not aligned to the supposed pixel raster.
The only 16 bit game I know is Terraria.
I think the NES era is still more nostalgic. Give it 4 more years.
I loved how Mega Man 9 included many of the hardware limitations like flickering sprites, even though it's modern game.
@@nugget6635 Flicker is actually not a glitch, it's an intentional programming "trick" to allow for more sprites on the screen at once. I found this out after trying NES development (which is very difficult, especially for someone who struggles with coding like myself)
@@williamdrum9899 yeah. it's programmed into the game. it's not built into the hardware, like most people _assume_.
the way it's programmed in games is also really difficult.
1 byte consoles
1 byte = 8 bit
nemkutya.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/98253-1-hobbit-1-hobbyte.jpg xD
Here's how the big guys define what a byte is: int number_of_bits_in_a_byte = CHAR_BIT;
I know this thread is a bit old, but this isn't necessarily correct.
A bit refers to the smallest amount of data that can be addressed by a cpu, and is somewhat related to processor word length.
It just so happens to be 8 bits on modern systems, but can theoretically be any value.
Early computers from the 50's and 60's used different sizes for their bytes.
Hydrochloric Acid Correct. I wish I remember what it was, but I was watching a video about a retro piece of hardware (I want to say it was an ancient arcade architecture) that said the CPU used 19-bit word sizes. Seriously? What sadistic person made a 19-bit word-sized CPU? But going back, you can find all kinds of odd word sizes: 9, 12, 26, 39 and even higher. The world settled in on power-of-two word sizes because they made the most sense in the context of computer science.
This guy sounds really familiar
That's exactly what I was just thinking! I wonder who he is...
I just commented “are you game makers toolkit?” And then saw this comment. Thanks for clarifying. Subbing solely based on who you are. I’m sure this channel is full of quality video if you’re here.
@@tanner_titus I haven't worked at Pocket Gamer / AppSpy for about 7 years so don't expect anything from me here :P
Exactly. I'm glad someone made a video bringing this up. Calling something 8-bit is really unspecific.
Natok the Watok Yes plus
8bit became a very popular buzzword for lo-fi graphics and sound, even thought it's not technically 8bit
Still goes after the nostalgia factor that the actual 8-bit games have so it makes sense what they're referring to
saying a pixel game is 8 bit is like saying a 2d animation is tradional animation.
Tangy ™ hand drawn animation i think
But traditional animation is 2D animation. Are you saying that tradigital animation is not the same as traditional animation? Because they're similar, but one is done digitally and the other is done on paper and cels.
SeepMan pixel art. the same
@@TotallyGoodatGames paper and cels are traditional
@@DVDRAR Yes.
there was on arcade game that allowed you to shoot down icbms which I believe was called "missile command". if you were good enough to get to a certain point in the game, probably frame 256, it would give you back all of your missile launchers even if they had been destroyed.
Mark Brown???????
Thank God I Thought I was the only one!!!! 😫😫😫
Yes, he's a guest in this video
Uh... Google. search "how to avoid clones"
Sounds like it...
Mark Brown!!!
La-Mulana really emulates the look of an MSX game very well
It legitimately looks like it could run on an MSX2
Flappy bird doesn't even try to emulate 8-bit. I looks a bit like Super Mario World, which was 16-bit.
But with 10% of the animation budget.
8 bit refers to the data bus of the processor, so it refers to the ammount of data which can be stored inside address in the memory and that can be moved in one cpu cycle
Nice video but it never even mentions what the term "8 bit" actually means in terms of CPU architecture
What people called "x-bits" in the late 80s-90s was always very vague, and more of a buzzword than anything.
At first they meant the processor word size, but then you had processors that had 16 bits words but only had an 8 bit external bus size, so their speed was limited. Then you also had the number of bits per pixel used to display graphics. So got things like the TurboGrafx-16 were the CPU was 8-bit, it had supposedly a 16-bit graphics processor, but could only make use of 9-bits of color.
In the end what actually matters is the quality of the games.
customsongmaker yes he did at :47...
X-bit refers to the number of binary values the processor can work with. 4 Bit processors work with 4-bit binary (0000 or 0101). 8 bit processors work with 8-bit binary (00000000 or 00101011). 4 bit, like said in the video, can only store values from 0-15. 8 bit can store values 0-255. Today, we are using 64 bit processors (mostly, there are some 32 bit processors being used). They are capable of storing values from 0-9,223,372,036,854,775,807 (9.2 quintillion). processors with higher bits support more RAM and can run more efficiently. (I also believe that some programs are smaller when 64 bit than their 32 bit counterparts.) 32bit processors only support 4 GigaBytes of RAM. 64 bit Processors Support up to 16.8 Exabytes or 16.8 million Terabytes.
It means nothing. There are very many things to consider (ALU width, registers width, data bus width, plus multiplexing on the top), so it is not really a tech term, more of marketing stuff. 6502 can be a good example of very 8-bit architecture, though, as it has 8-bit ALU, 8-bit registers including the stack, 8-bit data bus, sees the address space as set of 256-byte pages, and is not capable for atomic 16-bit calculations. For most of other CPUs it is not that clear. For one, Z80 considered 8-bit, but has 4-bit ALU, but also capable for atomic 16-bit calculations.
I thought basically it meant that with 8 bits the programmers binary that makes up the programming of the game has 8 spaces for the 0's and 1's to make up information.....that may be oversimplifying. ..
fuckkk 5:24 he didn't get the coin
Woah, is this Mark Brown from Game Maker's toolkit narrating?
Is this your channel too, Mr Mark Brown?
Great vid. My personal take on the whole loose definition of 8-bit is that now is the perfect opportunity to create games that may not have been possible on old hardware for one reason or another but evoke the same kind of nostalgia and sport a similar look to one. If someone wants to try to emulate something an old system would have been capable of then they're free to do so, but strict adherence to those limitations is not mandatory by any means.
Where' does the picture at 1:27 originate from? It soo pretty
Search for "Mark Ferrari". He has a whole bunch of great 8-bit art pieces.
it's also not 8-bit, i don't know why he says this
sorry I'm late to the party, but that really is 8-bit. It actually can run on the Atari 800XL.
Seriously digging the blaster master music
64 Bits! 32 Bits! 16 Bits! 8 Bits! 4 Bits! 2Bits! 1Bits! 1/2 Bit!! 1/4 Bit!!! THE WRIST GAAAAME!!!!!!
These are a caveman's version of video games, It brought down the video game industry as low as it could go,it's proof that jesus died in vain and legally changed his middle name to FUCKING
It's a shitty version of the Virtual Boy... Yes, I said that!
stufaman as if the virtual boy wasn't shitty enough
***** It did have a head strap though.
Bits cannot go down into fractions...
Good video ! I like NES specificities like 8x8 sprites, and the explaination why some parts of sprite sometimes disappear at 3m08 ! Thx for this video !
Actually, there's a 8x16 sprite mode, but it's not very useful unless the game scrolls vertically. It also limits you to 32 sprites, so in essence, there's still 64 sprites, but they are automatically glued together for you by the hardware.
Is that Blaster Master music I hear in the background?
Yes Indeed!! One of my favorite NES games.
@@Blackavelli202 same
What pisses me off even more is when someone says "8-bit music". It's friggin Square and triangle waves you assclowns, maybe with a white noise channel to spice things up a bit.
yes, the square wave on the nes was more like 3-bit. not sure about the triangle or noise channels. the samples channel was 1-bit (delta modulated) but with a fairly high sample rate (which i believe was variable, and had to share clock cycles with cpu instructions)
Actually, pulse (not square, because of the duty control) wave is 1-bit by the nature, wouldn't be pulse/square otherwise. But pulse channel DACs are 4-bit, providing 16 levels of volume. The triangle is 4-bit, a counter sends 0-15-0 sequence to the DAC. Noise is 1-bit by the nature of digital noise generators (LFSR), but also has 4-bit DAC to control the volume. DPCM uses 1-bit encoding for the data, but sample channel DAC is actually 7-bit, although in the DPCM mode it only uses 6 bits. So one could count a lot of bits in the NES sound hardware, but 8 is nowhere to be found.
Haha, yeah, thats what i meant
Chiptune is any fucking waveform you want. But I guess you have only heard of the NES.
umm well we were talking about the term "8 bit music" and using NES as an example. yeah obviously chiptunes encompasses any music produced by a chip (or at least music that sounds like it is)
I can't stand when music claims to be 8-bit, but isn't. True 2A03 8-bit music only has 4 sound channels. The UA-cam channel Bulby makes "8-bit" remixes, but they sound nothing like the NES sound channels.
I can't stand when people talk about 8-bit but only refer to the NES.
SID was better sound processor, so there!
Though I do feel your pain, it appears that to the young 'uns 8 bit means nothing more than "composed solely to square waves"
*****
Hate to go all Four Yorkshireman on you, but back when I were a lad, t' Commodore 64 only 'ad THREE VOICES and only had t' choice of square wave, sine wave, sawtooth, noise, and "pulse" whatever that were...
Mind, we did 'ave adjustable Attack, Decay, Sustain and Release on t' different voices and we could reprogam t' different channels to t' different waveforms anywhile, it were reet good in fact!
chip tunes
Señor Inteligente
There are 2 square channels, 1 triangle, and 1 noise. (dpcm could be a 5th channel, but if you want TRUE chip tune, forgo the dpcm channel)
The square channels can have 3 different wave forms and the volume can be adjusted. The triangle had 1 form, and no possibility to for volume adjust. Noise has 2 forms, and volume adjust is possible.
Yeah, because only the NES is true 8-bit. Fuck the rest. Fuck the Master System. Fuck the C64. Fuck the Game Boy and especially the PC Engine.
Being old enough to remember 8 bit computers and when they were brand new, I take 8-bit to mean the hardware and its foibles.
So seeing so-called "8-bit" games where sprites rotate and don't snap to the actual pixelly grid, making it clear that they're actually modern games running on a modern system, just that the sprites are given that deliberate blocky look, it's kind of a lie... it's an aesthetic choice that stills jars. It's like, why use that look if you can't pull it off?
Seeing the pixels rotate makes me very upset.
Games like Mega Man 9 and 10, Shovel Knight, Freedom Planet and Sonic Mania have incredible Sprite work for modern systems however.
@Vikrinox 3u,bxbw9wc
I believe that true 8-bit sprites have separate, rotated versions when needed.
I wish you would have discussed the Master System at least for a moment. Nice video anyway.
You've nailed it mate! Great explanation and great video!
*Listens to Mark's smooth voice and feels at peace with the universe*
the " 8-bit " is referring to the video memory or VRAM, particularly the physical bus lines that go in and out of them.
Ahhh I like this kind of video is it possible you come up with more? Good job. Great video!
+JohnRegularYum This guy (@britishgaming) actually makes videos like this on his own channel (called Game Maker's Toolkit) as well - I would recommend checking it out if you haven't already. :)
When pixels size are in consistent, when the pixels rotate and when the sprites have too many colors to where it's a SNES or Genesis game pallet with NES shaped sprites it makes me really uncomfortable.
The reference to 8-bit is derived from the data bus of the CPU, which was typically a Z-80 or 6502.
When it comes to micro-processors it commonly refers to the word size, some 8-bit processors had 16 bit data buses, while still being able to operate on 8 bit words at a time. Said that is not as clear cut as some did have narrower ALUs, and some had instructions for working with 16-bit data.
Can the tiles in the sprite layer be any 3 of the 12 colors, or do they have to be from a pallet??
Well, an 8 bit number can be one of 256 different numbers. One doesn't have "256 places to store information".
Flappy bird looks like a DS game.
Spectrum has that stupid monochrome 8×8 tile thing as its biggest limitation (other than 1-bit sound).
flappy bird looks more like a gba game
FPGAs are really great for those interesting in retro-computing or learning how a CPU works. I am implementing Ben Eater's 8-bit computer in an FPGA in a series of videos on my channel for anyone interested. Very cool stuff!
love the Blaster Master music in the background
So I guess that instead of calling it "8-bit", it should be called "pixelated"?
There you go, Shovel Knight ain't 8bit style, it's more towards 16bit.
You missed the entire point of the video. There's no "8bit" style, only a replication of what popular 8bit consoles at the time could produce. Shovel knight isn't any "bit", and if you consider CPUs then it would be 32/64bit with an aesthetic similar to consoles like the NES.
The "bitness" of the machine does not always determine graphical power. The Atari ST was 16bit but only could produce 16 colours at once, and the PC Engine has an 8bit CPU, but has similar graphics to the SNES/Megadrive. Early IBM PCs were 16/32bit but depending on the graphics card, only could produce 4/16 colours at once.
Mixa No, the developer wanted to make a game that looks like a NES game
CodeNameZ That was just marketing speech, I don't really care what the devs have said when the end product looks more like Super Metroid or Castlevania 4 rather than Ducktales or Super Mario 3.
It only adapted the gameplay elements from nes era, but graphically it's definitely snes style.
I'd say it is very PC Engine style, not SNES. Similar palette, similar capabilities, including sound.
PC Engine games were generally more colourful - more close to the Megadrive in capabilities.
Mate. I know it's a five year old video but I must commend you on explaining this simply, concisely and clearly, with no other nonsense cluttering up your video. Cheers.
8 bit is overhyped, depressing shit, 16 bit on the other hand...
Miljörör för språkpartiet lol du menar väl språkrör för miljöpartiet lol
bd
32 bit >>
Super mario world, sonic rhe hedgehog...
1:34 I want that NES with the black power and reset buttons. Gotta be highly collectible. Can't find really anything about it either. Also at 1:37 the Zelda cart says "The legend of Zelda sold separately" I bet that cart has value.
I feel like "8-bit" style games just exist for the most part to make them easier to design and render.
I think "8-bit" style games exist as nothing more than an aesthetic choice and to play on the nostalgia of old farts like me who remember their Commodore 64s from the first time round. What they mean to these young'uns I have no idea, but I'm guessing it means simple, easy and throwaway, the complete opposite of actual 8 bit games which took their cue from the arcades.
Arcade games were designed to kill you quickly and frustratingly so you'd keep chucking in 10p pieces to beat your high score.
Though back in the day arcade games were referred to as "coin ops" (short for coin operated) rather than arcade games as you'd find them in quite a few other places apart than arcades in the olden days (at least in the UK)
GeoNeilUK I've played my fair share on arcade machines... on emulators. Got fed up of pressing the "insert a coin" button to be honest.
I know it's not an arcade game or even 2D, but have you read up on how much effort was put into Crash Bandicoot? They had to keep tweaking the levels and whatnot, let it build, often overnight, then see if it actually worked well on the PS1, mostly due to hardware limitations. Crazy stuff!
And nowadays there are plenty of shoddily-programmed "8-bit" games which I can't even get running smoothly on mid/high-range hardware.
Also, you seem to know your stuff (or at least sound like you do). Do you know of anywhere (preferably Scotland) with a real pinball machine? I should probably look in some arcade-type places but it's never really crossed my mind at the right time.
The King of Fighters is shifted to 3D models because the 2D Pixel Art was too expensive.
The rendering of a pixel art game is kinda tricky because of the resolution and the way it works on different aspect ratios.
It's not that it's easier or cheaper. It's an esthetic choice, the sad part is that the audience/the players see it as a limitation or as a retro-inspired visuals not as a choice like hand-drawn or cellshading...
GeoNeilUK I've never seen a single modern "8-bit" game that I've thought looked like it was on a retro console.
As an indie game developer, that's absolutely accurate. Good art is difficult and time consuming, and if it's too high-quality there are more code complications to take into account than when you can control each pixel almost individually. Some people try to emulate older games' art styles as a way to hide this facet or as an attempt to look better, as it worked for those games, whereas other developers try to adapt to larger color palettes and more precise rendering.
Your video is amazingly in depth and seems quite factually correct from what I remember, although I'm not going to go through the effort of verifying it. So, it is quite interesting that when you talk about 256 colour graphics, you displayed Sonic the Hedgehog as an example, when actually the Sega Genesis Megadrive was capable of only approximately 64 colours simultaneously displayed on screen. Actually it's 4 palettes of 16 colours each to give 64, but actually it's a little less than 64 when you consider that a colour in each palette is actually supposed to indicate which pixels are transparent.
My childhood
Thanks for this video. It's to mention that the problem in den 80's was that RAM (random access memory) was very expensive. To make a computer or playing console cheap enough but still allowing colorful graphics, such restrictions/color concepts in the video chip were needed.
I wonder if 16-bit retro is a thing. Pretty sure the SNES, Amiga, Atari ST were 16-bit, and I've seen some attempts to emulate that art style. But never hear it called 16-bit style and so far mostly I've only seen it in illustrations for stuff like New Wave/Retro music.
All of those just fall under 8 bit these days. The kids wouldn't be able to tell the difference anyway.
Yeah, I suppose so. My wife always calls anything vaguely retro "8 bit", even 80s retro soundtrack music.
The SNES was the best 16bit console in terms of hardware by far.
1: Sound was clearly and unambiguously better with SNES because of more stereo channels.
2: SNES color pallet and simultaneous color limits were vastly larger than Genesis as well as sprite limits were much higher.
3: Way more buttons on the game controller and well designed for ease of access as well.
The Genesis's CPU was considerably faster than the SNES, but this is a moot point. The SNESs video memory and sound peripherals were so efficient that the SNES did not require such a fast processor to match the performance of the Genesis, and even surpass it. Sega tried to market their faster Genesis processor in the early 90s calling it " blast processing ". It was a misleading sales gimmick.
Yes, great, but we talking about retro style games.
It obviously didn’t help that the Genesis had “16-BIT” blasted all over it.
Informative video! However, you made a mistake at 3:08. Imagine NES sprites are numbered from 0 to 63. If you have the following row of sprites on a single line
*32 4 63 12 28 7 34 60 48*
It's not the rightmost sprite (48) that is going to be invisible, but rather sprite 63, as sprites are displayed in their order in RAM, taking a whopping 256 bytes of RAM (Or 4 bytes per sprite).
And the most annoying for me - new games are rotating sprites ans pixels as they want. Which is.... stupid and impossible in the 8-bit times.
Yeah. A more accurate look would be to have other "costumes" for the sprite that are pointed up or down.
Not to mention is the pixels of the sprites not alighning with the backround pixels. They will always align, and without a single exception. None.
Thanks for this great episode of gmt, mark brown
0:50
The perfectionist in me died when he missed that mushroom.
where can i download this piece of art at: 1:23 ?
Hey I know that voice 😊 Mark Brown ?
I never even thought about how the games worked on the colour scales..this video has opened my eyes!
I've only ever known "8-bit" as referring to older video games, such as from as early as the Atari 2600; to the Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Master System (yes I'm aware there's other computers and consoles that were 8-bit, I didn't intend to list every single one of them). When ever I see or hear of games like Shovel Knight, Castle In The Darkness or Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures, usually these are ones you'll find on Steam, and I've always known them as "pixel art" types of games, because obviously they could never be run on consoles like the NES or SMS, so..... who ever refers to the newer "pixel art" games as "8-bit" (or "16-bit" or "any-bit") are just idiots.
I think the snes could, if you really wanted it to, run a very simplified version of minecraft. XD
After all, it ran doom, and it could do 3d graphics and basic texture mapping with the right add-ons.
Would look very little like the real thing though.
It does sound like an amusing project to implement, come to think of it. XD
there was a virsion of minecraft called minecraft 4k, where the entire game was stored in just 4 kilobytes. the snes or even the nes could definitely run that
@Katarzyna Tomczak ua-cam.com/video/gKpLUAhLjOc/v-deo.html
Marked as favourite because it better (shorted and more visualized, forgot the 00 01 10 11 thing) explained than another video about 8-bit.
Y'know, visualizing things makes things much more understandable and memorable, believe me!
Then again, it's really interesting how old games work :)
I thought that 8 bit meant the processor could process 1 byte at a time and a 16 bit processor could do 2.
It does actually. As a result, an 8-bit cpu has no issues dealing with 16-bit values but the programmer has to treat them as two 8-bit chunks instead and add the carry to the higher 8-bit part during additions for example. Thankfully though, pretty much every CPU detects carry/overflow so it's easy to do.
+za909returns so thats how the timer can go past 256!
Sorry for the long comment, Bedsitdweller, although it's actually not as long as it looks if you skim over the enclosed sample of code marked off with ">" signs.
//I thought that 8 bit meant the processor could process 1 byte at a time and a 16 bit processor could do 2.//
No, that's clock speed. Even the oldest game consoles process way more than 1 or 2 bytes at any given time, or else the screen would only light up 1 pixel at a time! (Even if "at a time" meant tiny fractions of a second, it would still cause a strobing effect if that were the case.)
Bit architecture (8-bit, 16-bit, etc.) is the number of bits in a single character of source code. Despite popular belief, you could theoretically have today's graphics rendered from 8-bit character code in ASCII, and that's because a color on a pallet or an angle on a polygon or sprite (and so on and so forth) need NOT be limited to a single character on a sheet of source code! (However, doing so would tank your console in sales, precisely because most of the general public holds the incorrect belief that bit architecture is a measurement of graphical capability.)
Have you ever seen a sheet of source code? Something that looks like this?
> RossiterUp=c(11,2,3*(20/18),4*(20/18))
> RossiterUp
[1] 11.000000 2.000000 3.333333 4.444444
> RossiterUpPerMinute=c(0.55,0.1,0.17,0.22)
> RossiterUpPerMinute
[1] 0.55 0.10 0.17 0.22
> RossiterDown=c(13,6,7,6)
> RossiterDown
[1] 13 6 7 6
> RossiterDownPerMinute=c(0.65,0.3,0.35,0.3)
> RossiterDownPerMinute
[1] 0.65 0.30 0.35 0.30
> CreeksideUp=c(9,10,4,14)
> CreeksideUp
[1] 9 10 4 14
> CreeksideUpPerMinute=c(0.45,0.5,0.2,0.7)
> CreeksideUpPerMinute
[1] 0.45 0.50 0.20 0.70
> CreeksideDown=c(4,3,10,9)
> CreeksideDown
[1] 4 3 10 9
> CreeksideDownPerMinute=c(0.2,0.15,0.5,0.45)
> CreeksideDownPerMinute
[1] 0.20 0.15 0.50 0.45
> CherryTreeUp=c(11,15,5,4)
> CherryTreeUp
[1] 11 15 5 4
> CherryTreeUpPerMinute=c(0.55,0.75,0.25,0.2)
> CherryTreeUpPerMinute
[1] 0.55 0.75 0.25 0.20
> CherryTreeDown=c(7,6,13,8)
> CherryTreeDown
[1] 7 6 13 8
> CherryTreeDownPerMinute=c(0.35,0.3,0.65,0.4)
> CherryTreeDownPerMinute
[1] 0.35 0.30 0.65 0.40
>
> mean(RossiterUp)
[1] 5.194444
> mean(RossiterUpPerMinute)
[1] 0.26
> mean(RossiterDown)
[1] 8
> mean(RossiterDownPerMinute)
[1] 0.4
> mean(CreeksideUp)
[1] 9.25
> mean(CreeksideUpPerMinute)
[1] 0.4625
> mean(CreeksideDown)
[1] 6.5
> mean(CreeksideDownPerMinute)
[1] 0.325
> mean(CherryTreeUp)
[1] 8.75
> mean(CherryTreeUpPerMinute)
[1] 0.4375
> mean(CherryTreeDown)
[1] 8.5
> mean(CherryTreeDownPerMinute)
[1] 0.425
For the sake of intellectual honesty, this section of code is not *actually* from a video game or from the underlying engine of one. It is in fact from a session I spent in R (a specialized programming language for Biology-related statistics) for part of my Master's Thesis. Nevertheless, you get the idea.
Let's consider the line "RossiterDownPerMinute=c(0.65,0.3,0.35,0.3)". In 8-bit code (which is the minimum for ASCII to operate, by the way), the capital R at the beginning of that line would be 01010010. The lowercase r at the end of the word "Rossiter" would be 01110010. The opening parenthetical in the Create Set function ("c(...)") would be 00101000. The closing parenthetical would be 00101001.
In 16-bit code, 8 0's would be added to left of each: 0000000001010010, 0000000001110010, 0000000000101000, and 0000000000101001, respectively.
The real advantage of higher bit architectures is not better or more complex graphics, but rather, the ability to incorporate higher-order Unicode characters in the underlying source code. A 64-bit character architecture can theoretically accommodate the first 18.4 *quintillion* characters, and the actual Unicode standard hasn't even been developed to anywhere near that number of characters!
Again, though, most of the general public holds the incorrect belief that bit architecture is a measurement of graphical capability.
WillStrop2008
What the hell?
You just throw Randoms things together.
You are talking about character encoding. That is no real relation to the Bit System you are using, there are different standards with different bit usages, but that's it.
How you explained it, we could easily use 8bit architecure for everything.
But we also can allocate more RAM, save bigger numbers or even calculate more precisely.
3D Games wouldn't be possible how they are today if we would still use 8bit.
Also alles new consoles are 64bit not 128bit.
MrDavibu
Character encoding has *everything* to do with Bit Architecture. Bit Architecture, by definition, is the number of bits in each character of source code.
Just on the off chance you thought "character encoding" specifically meant the visible characters you see on the screen (I've run into other people who thought that), No. That's not the nature of source code.
Unicode is an extension of ASCII, and unlike raw ASCII, it extends into characters that require more than 8 bits to encode. While other (far less common) standards do exist, *all* of them require a consistent number of bits per character. (So no, I never said "everything" was possible with 8 bits per character. Not if you wish to encode foreign alphabets like Greek and Hebrew.)
Critical question: Which aspect of game play mechanics or graphics is limited in principle to only a single character of source code? If the answer is "nothing," than you can see how the number of bits in a single character is irrelevant to those higher level aspects of game programming.
Storing larger numbers can be accomplished by storing the same number in multiple addresses, as long as those addresses are consecutive. That technique can affect more precise calculation as well (via floating point values), but again, the consecutive addresses thing doesn't work for character encoding.
Well, the DreamCast and GameCube were 128-bit, but later console generations may well have gone back down to 64-bit architecture for the very reason I explained above. Thanks for the heads up if they did.
Anyway, keep in mind that we're talking about the length of a "word" in Binary, which, despite being called a "word," corresponds to a single letter of Source Code. Multiple "words" (letters) can be used consecutively to encode more complicated information.
Hello, any idea where the splendid pixel art screen is from, or the artist's name ?
I lost some friends after bringing up these details about Flappy Bird not being 8 bit...
Then they really werent your friends in the first place.
I guess imaginary ones for the sake of jokes don't exist
fascinating!! thank you, especially for the visualizaation of the mario constraints. Can you do a video on how those constraints relate to the actual hardware? like all the magic numbers, like why 968, 13, 4, 1, 8x8, 3 + 1, 12 etc
The narrator sounds a lot like Mark Brown from Toolmaker's Tool Kit
kernelPANIC Because it is actually him. *mumbles about reading the discription*
you can also get additional effects or what not by changing the resolution
I want to mildly hurt whomstever thought that shovel knight's graphics could run on an NES
The music however was made to closely emulate the NES's limitations and highly resembles Mega Man 1-6's sound front.
Hey, Retro City Rampage was ported to DOS, so who knows lol. With the appropriate tweaks (no parallax, etc.) it definitely could.
Julian Rey and yet no games on the NES looked like Shovel Knight. anyway, I take back what I said 2 years ago about hurting. I fear that people will hurt me
How does things looks like in lower bit?
What does a 4-bit or 2-bit game/song look like?
Actually "8-bit" refers to processor's word size.
actually, thats boolox
@@RobBob555 shut up
Yes except sometimes it doesn't. When talking about an 8-bit processor yeah, when talking about an 8-bit console... maybe, and when talking about "8-bits game/graphics" all bets are out, probably means the programmer did the graphics himself and used that as an excuse lol Not saying that there aren't cool looking pixelated/low-res graphics out there.
@@trinidad17 Then 8bit-style design... but not 8bit.
Well, imagine long ago, when everything was black and white, the first car. It had 1 cylinder, went 18mph. Blew everyone's minds. That's 8-bit. Then racing consoles came out with 2 cylinders, then four and now we all drive V8s and the consoles have some turbos too.
But quite soon we will be driving cars with zero cylinders!
Ow!
You said "La-Maluna". It's "La-Mulana"
That mispronunciation hurt me like a punch to the liver.
Heh, nice to see I wasn't the only one to notice. And it looks you're a fellow Saint Seiya fan too!
Thank you for actually writing it down. I never heard of the game and heard him say "Lat Ma Luna". When I tried to google the name I found absolutely nothing at all which was frustrating as hell.
When 8bit is said, a certain image appears in mind. Its like a retro genre. On my channel I use limitations and work with 8x8 sprites. Im no professional but i think im pulling it off pretty well lol.
i remember those games, no patch were needed back then. Everything was perfect!!
Now, we got No Mans Sky
So Action 52 was a perfect game that wasn't buggy or glitchy?
PerfectTube12
donkey kong country, super mario, TES Arena, etc... i dont know action 52
Da.shArk87 It's an NES game that contained 52 games on one cartridge, and it was horrific; games filled with glitches, broken mechanics, terrible graphics, etc. Broken games, licensed or otherwise, did exist on the NES, but because they were broken, they were long forgotten. The games you mentioned were good games that people still talk about to this day and are getting re-released on Virtual Console and other platforms.
ohh maybe it was an indie studio that sold Action 52, many indie studios made games at that time.. I had a smiliar cardridge like you on my original NES with like 70 games only of olympic sports, it was quite fun.. i miss those games actually :)
Da.shArk87 there were TONS of game breaking glitches. this fantasy is a lie spread throughout the internet that is easily disproven. most roms you download have been patched. in fact, new glitches are found all the time as people go back and replay old games. you are just wrong.
Is this guy Mark Brown from GMTK?
I've been very disappointed when at the end of the 128 bit era, nobody ever mentioned the bits anymore. This is the 512 Bit era. PERIOD.
Keep fighting that good fight, my man!
We don't need to know about your menstrual flow... And technically, Ps4 uses a 64 bit multi core processor. We have been in the 64 bit era since N64.
N64 wins. MENSTRUAL FLOW.
NAAAAAAAAY
8 bit does NOT have 256 places to store information
it has EIGHT places to store information, with a possible 256 combinations.
(basically 8 bit can be a value from 1 to 256 (0-255)
About 10 years from now we're going to laugh at this Generations Graphics in video games.
I don't laugh at any graphics based on their crudeness, just on poor artistic choices. Games have never been about faking the real world to me, so as long as it fits together in its own world and enables quality gameplay it's fine.
The majority of people want graphics and gameplay experience.
Or a loud minority. Loud minorities can be confused for the majority.
Not likely. Graphics technology evolves much much slower these days. Not that much happens in ten years anymore.
So, in short-- On a technical level, both the NES, and Gameboy utilize 2-bit graphics.
While the Atari VCS (or 2600), MSX homecomputers, Intellivision, Colecovision, and the ZX Spectrum, all use 1-bit graphics. (Some cheat though, with 2 colors per 8x8, or per 8x1 segment.)
I'm honestly fucking tired of this quasi-retro bullshit indie games. They aren't even trying to mimic the limitations of true 8-bit systems, and it looks just plain disguisting in some cases. They are so overused, because they are dirty cheap to make; you can make them yourself in ms paint.
try making a game on android for android, oh yeah YOU CAN'T
I think the idea is you can make a game without needing a full time professional 3d animator.
RozumariSama I would say 16-bit and above is fine though, and plenty of those games look amazing, with a lot of talent and effort.
Alex Ander Most pixel art games are imitating 16bit/early 32bit generation, usually running at 256 or more colours. I don't see these pixel art games emulating the colour scheme of the ZX spectrum or the limited palette of the NES for instance :)
+RozumariSama
Maybe they AREN'T all trying to mimic an 8-bit system's limitations...
I think some want to imitate the Genesis or SNES type of bits (I forget if it's called 16 or 32 bit tbh)
But I can see where your frustration comes from
instead of them marking all pixel games as "retro", perhaps they should just say "pixel art style." Cause there's a difference between "retro" and "pixel art."
4:57 what game is this?
64 bits
Mark?! This video just showed up in my recommended, I’ve been watching Game Maker’s Toolkit since it’s early beginning days. I didn’t know he did anything before it though
Nobody would buy the games if they looked like actual 8-bit games. The color palette would be too limited (the C64 not only had just 16 colors, this was also out of a fixed palette of just 16 drab colors) and there would be other, very severe limitations (the ZX Spectrum could only display 2 colors in each 8x8 pixel block, for example).
From a technical standpoint, most so called "retro" games are closer to the late 16-bit generation like Neo Geo, late Amiga titles, Sega Genesis etc. but running at much higher resolution.
I would buy them.
so would I
What about the PC Engine? That was technically an 8bit system.
***** The PC engine had an 8 bit CPU but it also had 2 16 bit graphics processors, so it was an 8 bit system with 16 bit graphics
While the Atari ST was 16bit yet only could display 16 colours. The later MSX computers were 8bit and yet could display up to 256 colours at once.
16bit != better graphics automatically.
Fun fact about NES: every color is stored in PPU as a strict value of analog signal, so NES doesn't prepare high quality RGB frame, transform it into analog signal and send to TV, instead it just combines predefined analog signals, what effects in different colors between different NES consoles, TV's and even different video cables. Search for "Super Mario Bros" graphics, the sky is from blue to even pink, goombas are from brown to orange and so on.
#Warning: I am an Engineer and I'm here to explain something.
Sorry, but this wasn't fully explained clearly.
"8-bit" is in reference to the 8-bit registers of the processor. They did say "8-bit processors" but didn't really explain what that means.
The biggest two issues on processor register size is the amount of memory you can address and how large of chunks of data the processor can use at one time slice.
Modern example would be the Windows XP machines with 32-bit processors could only use 4 Gigabytes of Ram max (2^32), that hard memory restriction was the biggest limitation of those machines.
The true 8-bit processors could only access 256 bytes and only do calculations on values of 0-255 at one time.
Everything in this video is an effect/consequence, 8-bit registers are the cause/reason.
Couldn't 32-bit processors have used PAE to access more RAM, though? I heard that the main reason Intel was forced to go 64-bit on x86 was because of AMD.
@@pennyandrews3292 Yeah addressing is usually not the same as the word size. 8-bit processors did commonly have 12 or 16-bit addressing, and some 16-bit processors had 20 or 24bit addressing available. x86 real mode has 20-bit addressing, and there are many other different modes in x86 itself, some with pagination including PAE that you mentioned. With PAE you have a virtual 32-bit address space for each process, but the OS has 64-bits page table entries but less than than can be used for addressing, as it stores flags and other housekeeping there, it's fairly complex and hierarchical. But long story short on 32-bit x86 you can have up to 64GB of RAM using PAE, which is one of the x86 native memory management modes.
Aside from addressing, there is the whole data bus thing which can have a width on its own, the data being where the processor reads/writes the data it addressed using what we mentioned above, that also varies a lot depending on what architecture we're talking about, and also doesn't match the internal word size in some cases.
So, unless you specify what you're talking about "bits" doesn't actually mean that much. But when we say 8-bit processor the common thing is to assume we're talking about word size, or at least the word size the processor exposes to the developer as some had 4-bit internal words... it can be complicated to say the least heh, but the common thing we we're talking about the processor is to assume it to be the word size.
I love pixelart graphics. Good thing that the recent popularity of indies is bringing back many genres from 8 and 16bit eras.
And now 8bits dominating the NFT spaces. Even the old games are coming back like Faketown which is 8bits too. the old styles are coming back and its really good.
The word 8-bit is like rape, used so much that it lost its meaning
Yeah, but unlike 8-bit, actual rape is still happening.
@@a.wadderphiltyr1559 I don't get what oil has to do with rape, but I'm sure someone out there enjoys your comment.
where is the 16 bit explanation video?
Such an informative video! Deserves much more views
What is the background music. I know it's from an NES game, but which one! ;-;
What is the one called after he names "8-Bit Bird"?
For me... 8-bit is anything that looks like a NESS game or maybe an Atari game.
Once you push past that, your in 16-bit territory, and if you push past anything like that and you get into 32-bit looking graphics like you might see in a DS game like Castlevania Dawn of sorrow.
For me it IS the amount of colors, maybe even resolution.
If it looks like an old Atari or NESS game it's 8-bit
If it looks like a Sega Genesis or SNESS game than it's 16-bit
If it looks like a DS or PS1 game, than it's 32-bit...
Depends on how far you push the visuals and colors.
What game is being played at 3:41 it looks just like Batman Return of The Joker
in modern "8-bit" games, even if they have flickering and colors and pixely graphics, there is one thing thats common in almost all of them.
*ROTATED PIXELS*
Awesome video! You explained all of this very well and in an understanding matter.
8-bit=limitation, nostalgic, code in assembly
Immediately realize that the video is narrated by Mark Brown... instant subscription!
1:35 What kind of NES is that? It's not a 001 right?
What's the name of the game at 3:22? Used to play that a long time ago but forgotten the name of it now. Thanks
I’ve seen this before and tried to look up what it was called @1:20 can anyone help me out?
Thanks for the video! This is silly but when I was younger I thought 8 bit meant that every character and object was made by 8 pixels...the bits XD. But then I counted Mario's pixels and of course it was not 8...
If you want to be technical, Mario is actually 2 sprites that are both 8 pixels wide placed next to each other. (16 pixels tall though since the NES could do that without taking another sprite slot.)
@@angeldude101 Yeah! I've been learning more about the NES and it's really interesting!
Since all games these days (with rare exceptions) are 32 or 64-bit, since that's all that the processor can run, then what do we call these games that are trying emulate 8-bit styles?